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Showing posts with label Alan greenspan. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Alan greenspan. Show all posts

Saturday, March 27, 2010

What if It Was All Just a Big Bubble?


One of the things that many people go through their entire lives without ever realizing is that conditions haven’t always been the way they remember them to be. Due to the length of a typical lifetime and the number of those years that individuals are productive, it’s reasonable to think that someone in their mid-60s could retire today and look back at the last 40 years only to conclude that what they just experienced was normal.

But, what if the last 40 years were anything but normal?

What if, in the world of finance and economics, it was all just a big bubble?'

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Tuesday, March 02, 2010

The Case Against Greenspan and Bernanke


Is there enough evidence to indict Ben Bernanke and Alan Greenspan on charges that they aided and abetted the banks and other financial institutions in the sale of fraudulent loans to investors?

That depends on whether there is sufficient proof to show whether the two men KNEW that the nation's lenders were engaged in large-scale predatory lending and chose to do nothing. As we'll see, both Greenspan and Bernanke were warned repeatedly about the mortgage/derivatives scam by credible professionals and industry regulators, but failed to act.'

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Thursday, October 22, 2009

Why Were Lessons of 1998 Mini-Crash Ignored?


The American financial system almost collapsed in 1998 when a hedge-fund, "Long Term Capital Management" went belly up. In a harbinger of 2008, banks had placed huge derivative bets on the Russian economy with LTCM.

The Fed forced 13 US and international banks to purchase the hedge-fund. Altogether $4.6 Billion was lost.

A PBS Frontline Documentary "The Warning" magnificently shows that although the American (and world) economies are at stake, the Clinton and Bush Administrations refused to regulate the derivative market, and allowed it to grow to an eventual $595 Trillion during the housing bubble.

Not only did they refuse to regulate the industry, they forced out Brooksley Borne, the Chair of the Commodities Futures Trading Commission, who had demanded action.'

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Wednesday, September 09, 2009

Greenspan Says Financial Crisis Will Reoccur (And he Should Know!)


Alan Greenspan, the former US Federal Reserve chairman blamed in some quarters for not doing enough to prevent the financial crisis, has predicted that more crashes are inevitable.

Speaking a year after the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the US investment bank, Mr Greenspan said: "The crisis will happen again but it will be different. They [financial crises] are all different, but they have one fundamental source," he told the BBC. "That is the unquenchable capability of human beings when confronted with long periods of prosperity to presume that it will continue."

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Monday, March 23, 2009

'Down the Memory Hole,' Alan Greenspan Style


He's back and in denial in a March 11 Wall Street Journal op-ed headlined: "The Fed Didn't Cause the Housing Bubble." He lied, the way he did throughout his career and for 18.5 years as Fed chairman. How else could he have kept the job, be knighted in the UK for his "contribution to global economic stability, wisdom and skill," then afterwards be extolled by the Money Trust he enriched.
So now he's preserving his "legacy" by expunging its dark side the way Orwell described in 1984 - "down the memory hole," a convenient slot for "any document....due for destruction," politically inconvenient truths to be erased to preserve only sanitized versions for the public. It's called historical revisionism, but even some on the right aren't convinced.