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Strategies & Market Trends : Booms, Busts, and Recoveries -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: maceng2 who wrote (73500)	5/14/2010 4:38:01 AM
From: Maurice Winn	1 Recommendation Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74559

Thanks for those links. As usual, they are talking their own book. For example: <But on Thursday, almost three years after stepping down as chairman of the Federal Reserve, a humbled Mr. Greenspan admitted that he had put too much faith in the self-correcting power of free markets and had failed to anticipate the self-destructive power of wanton mortgage lending. “Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholders’ equity, myself included, are in a state of shocked disbelief,” he told the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. > He didn't say that he was wrong about self-correcting free markets. The writers need reading comprehension lessons. They took his comments and twisted them and enlarged them and then drew conclusions that couldn't be drawn from the comments. What he said was precisely what he said. It is quite surprising when shareholders self-destruct. He said he was shocked at the extent of the lack of self-protection. He didn't say free markets don't work. And so on. As he explained, there is now enormous self-correcting going on irrespective of regulatory trivia. He didn't do anything wrong in the sense of evil-doing. His mistakes were relatively minor. I don't think there's a problem with leaving it up to shareholders to manage their risks and loose their shirts when they get it wrong. What was wrong was the donation of public funds to private interests. I was looking forwards to buying one of the financial institutions and 10,000 houses. I couldn't outbid the tax payer though. Barclays nabbed part of Lehman and others nabbed other assets. But Alan Greenspan was long gone when the public funds lolly scramble was on. Greenspan said me made some mistakes - true enough and I spotted a couple in Y2K and 2004 [slow dropping rates and slow increasing them]. But it was just a matter of degree. People should still take responsibility for their decisions to borrow. He didn't force anyone to borrow. Debtors blaming the money creator is like drunks blaming the brewery and drug addicts blaming the opium growers. Alan Greenspan did nothing wrong in the sense the word wrong was being used = criminal intentions. He made some minor mistakes. Mqurice