| Very interesting article which shows how absolutely clueless Greenspan was. Recall how he put the money supply on steroids in the late 90's out of fear that Y2K would crater the world economy. Y2K came and went with a mild ho-hum but it left the Internet bubble in it's wake. While Greenspan's monetary policies were a major factor in creating the Internet bubble, his idea was that it was all the magic of productivity increases. So in January, 2001, with no idea that the economy was in fact a winding down bubble economy, his next fear was that we would pay off our public debt. In hindsight that was totally delusional, but if you had any understanding of accounting, it was totally delusional then too. Using cash accounting, the "public debt" wasn't the total public debt by a long stretch. If you were to use accrual accounting (GAAP), the public debt(total liabilities of debt, medicare/medicaid, social security) was in the $30-40 trillion range. Greenspan may be an economist, but he sure ain't no accountant. In fact, neither are any of our politicians. If we were to pass a constitutional amentment that required ten percent of the House and the Senate to be CPA's, we might have a ghost of a chance of working ourselves out of the mess we're in. By the way, I'm not an accountant but I do understand accrual accounting and what the total liabilities of the US government represent. |
