Well, I had an interesting discussion last night that kind of left me surprised. A friend who is a computer scientistand has worked in banks (and developed algorithms for trading programs etc) getting his MBA and working with some professors/economists etc, and he said, to sum it up:
Greenspan is the best, there's nobody like him. Basically, we were likely headed for an out-of-control recession--like the one that hit Japan in its heyday and had repercussions throughout all of Asia etc, and so, yes, he engineered a recession, one he/we could control (hopefully) and that is much better.
Now, lots of people on these threads have protested that we had growth and no inflation and Greenspan is working on an outmoded view, and also he crunches stale #s (thus with revised q4 #s it looks like he should have been cutting rates in q3) etc etc. I have no idea, I'm way too uneducatd in this area. But basically my friend's view and apparently that of the educated econoimsts etc was that indeed Greenspan saw the picture clearly.
In addition we talked about how far computer science and artificial intelligence and so on has gone, and that once banks develop programs (AI is getting really advanced) that can work across domains, i.e. across markets--to know for instance when this market goes up, later this market goes down or up--whatever--that the manipulation of markets will become even more pronounced. There is a bank in Germany that has developed proprietary software that has made them 300% based purely on the program following its rules and trading. However nobody has yet developed AI that can "learn"--thus you still have to watch it closely, as markets are always shifting and becoming different markets, and the machine can't yet shift between them.
Even so, it was an eye opener. |
