Intervju Greenspan om hans memoarer
Johan Schück
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Alan Greenspan memoirs:
The Age of Turbulence
Amazon: The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World
A lifelong libertarian, Alan Greenspan does not ordinarily advocate giving the government more power.
But he does so in a new epilogue to the paperback edition of his memoir,
parts of which were made available to The Economist.
The Economist print edition Aug 7th 2008
Central Bank's monetary policy was not the primary cause of
the persistant decline in inflation and long-term interest rates
Alan Greenspan, The Age of Turbulence, p. 14
Why Greenspan does not bear most of the blame
The US is in no way exceptional for the level of residential investment.
Somewhat to my surprise, the share of residential investment in UK gross domestic product has been much the same as in the US.
The outliers here are Ireland and Spain.
Martin Wolf FT April 8 2008
Not even Alan Greenspan
One great puzzle about the recent housing bubble is why even most experts didn’t recognize the bubble as it was forming.
Robert J. Shiller, New York Times March 2, 2008
Why did three Republican presidents name a Federal Reserve chairman
fundamentally opposed to the GOP's economic doctrine?
Robert D. Novak, Washington Post, September 24, 2007
Master of the Universe (Rtd)
Alan Greenspan’s legacy? More data are needed. It is, as yet, too early to tell.
Review by Alan Beattie, Financial Times, September 22 2007
Alan Greenspan memoirs: The Age of Turbulence
His book might equally have been entitled The Age of Disinflation.
For the big theme of this work is how the triumph of laisser faire capitalism around the world over the past quarter-century delivered
a golden period of low inflation, low interest rates and global prosperity.
Krishna Guha, Financial Times, September 17 2007
Mr. Greenspan has just published a book in which he castigates the Bush administration for its fiscal irresponsibility.
Well, I’m sorry, but that criticism comes six years late and a trillion dollars short.
Paul Krugman, New York Times 17/9 2007
Now He Tells Us
Peggy Noonan, Wall Street Journal, September 22, 2007
Why did three Republican presidents name a Federal Reserve chairman
fundamentally opposed to the GOP's economic doctrine?
Robert D. Novak, Washington Post, September 24, 2007
After four decades of Alan Greenspan's nimble maneuvers, it seemed no accident that publication of his long-awaited memoir, "The Age of Turbulence," coincided with global financial turmoil. Instead of examining his frequently suspect management of monetary affairs during 18 years as chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, the political and financial worlds focused last week on Greenspan's self-portrait as a "conservative libertarian" who deplores Republican leaders and their policies.
Greenspan knows that the surest route to praise in Washington is for a purported man of the right to be seen as embracing the left. Although appointed by Republican presidents to four of his five terms heading the nation's central bank, Greenspan in his memoir is markedly more negative about those political benefactors than reviewers have suggested. Only Gerald Ford, the hapless, short-term president, gets passing grades.
In "The Age of Turbulence," Greenspan buys into the discredited depiction of Ronald Reagan (who first named Greenspan to the Fed) as an amiable dunce and does not conceal his contempt for both Bushes (each of whom nominated him). Even more surprising is his adoration of Clinton. While scathing in attacking increased spending by George W. Bush, he ignores massive non-defense spending hikes under Clinton and embraces the Democrat's tax increase "as our best chance in 40 years to get stable long-term growth."
Greenspan's book treats Reagan's tax-cutting, supply-side movement as if it never happened. Seeing no inherent benefits from a lower tax burden, he accepts the Democratic deficit-reduction formula that a dollar of higher taxes is equivalent to a dollar of reduced spending.
With the memoir retreating from his passive endorsement of Bush's 2001 tax cuts, it is hard to tell the Greenspan of this book from a conventional Democrat.
Master of the Universe (Rtd)
Alan Greenspan’s legacy? More data are needed. It is, as yet, too early to tell.
Review by Alan Beattie, Financial Times, September 22 2007
The author is the FT’s world trade editor. Between 2002-2004 he covered the Federal Reserve for the FT in Washington. Before joining the newspaper in 1998, he was an economist at the Bank of England
The famous saying (famous among central bankers, anyway) of the Cambridge economist John Maynard Keynes was his hope that economics would one day become as humble and routine as dentistry. The dentists can rest for the moment safe in the knowledge that the dispassionate dullness of their craft remains unchallenged.
The appeal of Greenspan’s memoirs should be relatively broad – they are at least more lucid than his famously opaque prose while in office. But what emerges from the book is that even he, who knew so much more than most, knew far less than most supposed.
The darkest secret of central bankers is that they are generally working from the same data as everyone else.
It was his mastery of the minutiae that enabled him to make one of the smartest moves of any central banker’s career, and one for which he will be rightly revered: spotting the productivity surge of the 1990s in the US economy, and realising that a car whose cylinder size had just increased did not have to have the brakes slammed on as early to prevent the engine overheating.
The cottage industry of Fed-watchers will pick two things in particular out of this book
The first is Greenspan’s account of dealing with the bubble of the 1990s stock market.
The second is a mea culpa for supporting a giant tax cut by President George W. Bush that turned out to be the first misstep in a lurch away from the path of fiscal probity.
His tongue in the famous, or infamous, speech of 1996 musing whether “irrational exuberance” had taken hold. The markets roared upwards regardless, and he concluded that only massive increases in interest rates, which would also have hammered the real economy, would have done the trick, and
that it was better to clear up after the mess by cushioning the blow to the economy when the bubble burst of its own accord.
Less impressive is his half-apology on the subject of tax cuts.
Alan Greenspan memoirs: The Age of Turbulence
His book might equally have been entitled The Age of Disinflation.
For the big theme of this work is how the triumph of laisser faire capitalism around the world over the past quarter-century delivered a golden period of low inflation, low interest rates and global prosperity.
Krishna Guha, Financial Times, September 17 2007
The turbulence to which Mr Greenspan refers in the title has two meanings:
the wrenching change driven by the dynamic force of global capitalism and
the bouts of dysfunction that periodically afflict the market mechanism that lies at its heart.
Mr Greenspan argues that these occasional crises are unavoidable, because they – and the price bubbles that precede them – are ultimately rooted in the human psyche and its propensity to lurch from euphoria to fear.
Mr. Greenspan has just published a book in which he castigates the Bush administration for its fiscal irresponsibility.
Well, I’m sorry, but that criticism comes six years late and a trillion dollars short.
Paul Krugman, New York Times 17/9 2007
Mr. Greenspan now says that he didn’t mean to give the Bush tax cuts a green light, and that he was surprised at the political reaction to his remarks. There were, indeed, rumors at the time — which Mr. Greenspan now says were true — that the Fed chairman was upset about the response to his initial statement.
But the fact is that if Mr. Greenspan wasn’t intending to lend crucial support to the Bush tax cuts, he had ample opportunity to set the record straight when it could have made a difference.
His first big chance to clarify himself came a few weeks after that initial testimony, when he appeared before the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs.
Here’s what I wrote following that appearance:
“Mr. Greenspan’s performance yesterday, in his first official testimony since he let the genie out of the bottle, was a profile in cowardice. Again and again he was offered the opportunity to say something that would help rein in runaway tax-cutting; each time he evaded the question, often replying by reading from his own previous testimony. He declared once again that he was speaking only for himself, thus granting himself leeway to pronounce on subjects far afield of his role as Federal Reserve chairman. But when pressed on the crucial question of whether the huge tax cuts that now seem inevitable are too large, he said it was inappropriate for him to comment on particular proposals.
Now He Tells Us
Peggy Noonan, Wall Street Journal, September 22, 2007
Mr. Greenspan describes himself -- literally, in an aside he seems to find witty -- as "shocked, shocked" that politics is going on in Washington, and his words are being twisted.
But he never quite cleared it up, not at the time. He does it now, with the book, and after the advance. As a writer I am in passionate support of large advances, but $8.5 million to tell the American people what he should have told them when his views might have had an impact?
Long ago in a book called "What I Saw at the Revolution," I wrote that I was dismayed by White House memoirs whose underlying message was, "If only they'd listened to me, the fools!" I didn't want to do that, and in my case I couldn't. Sometimes if they'd listened to me they'd have been wrong indeed. Mr. Greenspan is an "If only they'd listened to me" man. He should have added, "And they might have if I'd been clear."