No, AG deserves a *great* deal of blame for the mismanagement. Greenspan is the one, single human being on the planet who had the power to single-handedly avoid this entire mess. It's his JOB to take away the punch bowl before everyone gets too sauced. There is a reason that we've had recessions periodically for as long as there has been capitalism, and they are good things. They purge the system, and remind everyone of the risks involved in a capitalist system. Greenspan has consistently tried to please everybody by avoiding the harsh medicine of recession, and in the process caused the present recession to be amplified exponentially.
AG deserves much blame. He should have let a recession happen in 1995. Or 1998, when it would have been worse, but not as bad as waiting 'til 2000. By attempting to hold it off yet another two years, he has further exacerbated the situation. There are scores of individual economic cycles - waves running underneath the overall economic surface. By forcing interest rates artificially low time and again, injecting heroin into the system repeatedly, he has synchronized every subcycle in the economy and every economy on the planet. Now, instead of having pockets of strength available to support the areas of weakness, we have synchronized global recession: synchronized across geography, and synchronized across industry.
This will all end so badly.
I've upgraded my forecast for the intensity and duration of the downturn yet again. Odds of a depression now exceed 50%.
BC |
