A couple of years back, a Reggae-influenced hip hop artist named Shaggy had a hit with a song called It Wasn't Me. The thrust of the song (pun sort of intended) was that Shaggy had gotten caught in the act with the girl next door by his girlfriend. Regardless of the fact that his girlfriend was watching him with this other woman, his approach was to simply deny everything:
She saw the marks on my shoulder (It wasn't me)
Heard the words that I told her (It wasn't me)
Heard the scream get louder (It wasn't me)
I hadn't thought of that song in quite a while, but it popped into my head this morning while reading Alan Greenspan's commentary, The Roots of the Mortgage Crisis, in this morning's Wall Street Journal. Following Greenspan's recent book, The Age of Turbulence, Greenspan has now turned to the Journal's editorial page where he lays the blame for the current mortgage crisis on... the collapse of Communism??? To quote Greenspan:
The root of the current crisis, as I see it, lies back in the aftermath of the Cold War, when the economic ruin of the Soviet Bloc was exposed with the fall of the Berlin Wall. Following these world-shaking events, market capitalism quietly, but rapidly, displaced much of the discredited central planning that was so prevalent in the Third World.
Yes, from a timing perspective, I guess the troubles did begin in the late 80's. As Herb Greenberg points out, that's also about the same time as he began his term as Chairman of the Fed.
That's not to say that Greenspan is the primary target for our subprime woes. However, he certainly has culpability, which you'd never sense from reading his memoir or today's editorial. The Fed is supposed to anticipate how the market may react to interest rate changes. While there are other agencies with primary responsibility for monitoring the banking industry, few had the ear of the public and the markets that Greenspan had. There were many warning signs, particularly as lenders began to steer borrowers into esoteric offerings like negative equity loans.
Of course, Greenspan isn't the only person whose words left me wondering this week. Newspaper magnate and soon to be convict Conrad Black caught the attention of many with his pre-sentencing courtroom statement earlier this week:
The other thing I'd like to say is I do wish to express very profound regret and sadness at the severe hardship inflicted upon all of the shareholders, including a great many employees, by the evaporation of $1.85 billion of shareholder value under my successors.
Yes, facing years of jail time, Black showed no remorse for his crimes, but simply disdain for the people who tried to clean up the mess he left behind at Hollinger.
To quote another Alan (Dershowitz), it takes chutzpah.
Greenspan fits in with the image makers of our times. Greenspan sells Greenspan as a branded way to control economic events. Fourty years ago, he was for the gold standard. Today he claims he imitated the gold standard with paper money. You can put any kind of value you want on paper money and if you have the power behind you, the value will float for awhile. You can put patches on it to stay afloat a long time but sooner or later a puncture comes and everything sinks. Greenspan protected the stock market values by lowering and raising interest rates.
He looked the other way when pay day loan sharks and supposedly reputable credit card companies charged 35 percent and even more for the loan of money and credit. He looked the other way while lenders played a game of monopoly with the housing market.
He looked the other way while personal and business bankruptcy kept breaking records.
Alan Greenspan started out playing a saxophone in a band. Most likely he played the popular tune Dancing in the Dark. He spent the rest of his life Dancing in the Dark in his economic world that never included workers.
Workers have no voice in his world and the Globalist Free Trade world Greenspan evangelized.
He found apostles in the Clintons and The Bush family who created their own images and brands to fit in the patterns set by Greenspan.
During Greespan's time in office, more than 4,000 U.S.factories were moved to Mexico.
The working middle class was converted to a working poor class. Today 46,000 apply for only 1,000 jobs at three new Wal-Mart stores in Ohio and Illinois. The jobs only pay near minimum wages and many are just part-time jobs.
And now the bell tolls for all the companies that closed down or went bankrupt and for the millions who lost their jobs during the most massive dislocation of jobs in U.S. history.
Now the clock is ticking on the housing market with record breaking foreclosures.
I wonder what history will record about Greenspan.
He never trusted human nature and put greed on the economic altar as something good.
See more at http://www.bizarrepolitics.com/greenspan-dancing-in-the-dark plus all the other Greenspan articles. It is a view of Greenspan from the trenches. See also http://tapsearch.com/flatworld
and
http://tapsearchnewsmobile.filetap.com
Posted by: Ray Tapajna | December 28, 2007 at 07:08 PM
Greenspan fits in with the image makers of our times. Greenspan sells Greenspan as a branded way to control economic events. Fourty years ago, he was for the gold standard. Today he claims he imitated the gold standard with paper money. You can put any kind of value you want on paper money and if you have the power behind you, the value will float for awhile. You can put patches on it to stay afloat a long time but sooner or later a puncture comes and everything sinks. Greenspan protected the stock market values by lowering and raising interest rates.
He looked the other way when pay day loan sharks and supposedly reputable credit card companies charged 35 percent and even more for the loan of money and credit. He looked the other way while lenders played a game of monopoly with the housing market.
He looked the other way while personal and business bankruptcy kept breaking records.
Alan Greenspan started out playing a saxophone in a band. Most likely he played the popular tune Dancing in the Dark. He spent the rest of his life Dancing in the Dark in his economic world that never included workers.
Workers have no voice in his world and the Globalist Free Trade world Greenspan evangelized.
He found apostles in the Clintons and The Bush family who created their own images and brands to fit in the patterns set by Greenspan.
During Greespan's time in office, more than 4,000 U.S.factories were moved to Mexico.
The working middle class was converted to a working poor class. Today 46,000 apply for only 1,000 jobs at three new Wal-Mart stores in Ohio and Illinois. The jobs only pay near minimum wages and many are just part-time jobs.
And now the bell tolls for all the companies that closed down or went bankrupt and for the millions who lost their jobs during the most massive dislocation of jobs in U.S. history.
Now the clock is ticking on the housing market with record breaking foreclosures.
I wonder what history will record about Greenspan.
He never trusted human nature and put greed on the economic altar as something good.
See more at http://www.bizarrepolitics.com/greenspan-dancing-in-the-dark plus all the other Greenspan articles. It is a view of Greenspan from the trenches. See also http://tapsearch.com/flatworld
and
http://tapsearchnewsmobile.filetap.com
Posted by: Ray Tapajna | December 28, 2007 at 07:21 PM