James Grant: Alan Greenspan thinks what everyone else thinks, but one fiscal quarter later.
Courtesy of Damien Hoffman at Wall St. Cheat Sheet
In a recent Bloomberg interview, James Grant, editor of Grant’s Interest Rate Observer, offered his assessment of Greenspan’s performance as Federal Reserve Chairman.
Grant on how he would grade Alan Greenspan:
“Here’s the book on Alan Greenspan. He thinks what everyone else thinks, but one fiscal quarter later. He has the lamentable knack, or lamentable tendency or personality trait of needing to be liked, which is not the best thing to have when you’re chairman of the Federal Reserve board.”
“So we saw him bullish on technology in March of 2000. We saw him ever so unhelpfully urge the American homeowner to consider adjustable rate mortgages at the very bottom of the interest rate cycle in the mid-aughts. He is a front-running momentum kind of guy and Wall Street’s full of them. He is just a guy in a business suit. That’s Alan Greenspan.”
Why Grant is a skeptic of Greenspan:
“Here’s the thing about Greenspan. The first — the second sentence of his prepared testimony he comes out against central planning, an audacious stance to take in front of this commission. He is against the Berlin Wall; he was glad it fell — it exposed the hopeless flaws of central planning. He is in the business of central planning. He, when he was Fed chairman, fixed an interest rate. And the interest rate he fixed did terrific damage from time to time because he told us how he would fix it and for how long.”
“Wall Street is nothing if not observant. And hearing him tell you that the rates will be low for a considerable period, people did what you would expect them to do which is to tee off. And that was the origin of this terrific debt bubble, the shrapnel of which we are paying for to this day and will continue to pay for.”
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