Memo to Greenspan: Enough already.

The unseemly, globetrotting, money-grabbing, legacy-spinning, responsibility-denying tour of Alan Greenspan continues, as relentless as a bad toothache. It brings to mind the words of the great Ring Lardner: " 'Shut up,' he explained."

I mean, Alan, please. Enough. How can we miss you if you won't go away?

If you missed it (and that would make you lucky), Greenspan is out and about, bloviating with renewed fervor, explaining that he is not to blame, even in a small way, for the housing and credit crises.

Earlier this week, writing in the Financial Times, he blamed "the misjudgments of the investment community" for the mortgage mess. A Wall Street Journal reporter emerged today from three interview sessions with Greenspan to report, "Mr. Greenspan says he doesn't regret a single decision." Today in Tokyo, Greenspan gave one of his typical speeches that drive copy editors nuts trying to pull a headline out of his wooly headed thinking.  I believe he said housing prices will stabilize "well before" early 2009. Unless they don't.

My foggy memory of American history from school is that public servants were supposed to serve for a while and then go home to their farm or their village. I don't remember the chapter that says ex-presidents and ex-Fed chairmen join some sort of permanent government for millionaires, flying around the world in private jets, invariably accepting suitcases full of cash for trading on their memories of working for the taxpayers. (Yes, that was a shot at the $100-million man, Bill Clinton, who seems to work very hard every day to make me regret twice voting for him).

Cranky today? You bet I am. My DVR cut out with 10 seconds left in the Memphis-Kansas game. That's my excuse. Your thoughts? Comments? E-mail story tips to peter.viles@latimes.com.
Photo Credit: Bloomberg News.

Comments

[Roger Moore]

What Mr. Greenspan conveniently fails to mention is that part of the job of the Fed is to supervise the banks and keep them from engaging in rampant speculation. Even if the Fed's loose fiscal policy wasn't to blame, it's supervisory failure was. Greenspan just doesn't want to admit it, because it both would make him look bad personally and discredit his extremist anti-regulatory philosophy.

[john vercellone]

nah for the last two decades the washington politicos have been planning our economy with them and the elite first and then the rest of us.the congress has been a millionaires club since clinton years

[dwr]

The Lady doth protest too much, methinks.

[Winfield J. Abbe]

Great statement above Peter Viles. I agree with every word. Wouldn't it be nice to have a transcrpt of the private conversations between Greenspan, Mr. B and all the other cronies since the bottom fell out? The banks and mortgage lenders have violated all the time honored rules of banking and Mr. Greenspan says it isn't his fault.
Our properties are (thankfully) all paid off. But in the roughly 40 years my wife and I have borrowed money from banks (we have been to roughly 100 closings or more), we always put up at least 20% cash down and obtrained fixed rate loans, some with interest rates as high as 17%, and none lower than 7%. These loan payments were always made FIRST, before any other considerations, even in hard times of which there were many. No bank or private lender ever lost one penney from us. We have perfect credit. I have no sympathy for either the banks or the lenders in this "crisis". Let free enterprise work. Let the chips fall where they may. NO BAILOUTS PERIOD!

[Cal]

Its amazing that he could have done nothing but the instant the Fed got out the regulatory hammer and started looking at things the whole situation started to rationalize pretty darn quickly.

Just a hint that regulators thought some of these practices might not have been kosher and the secondary market would have done a double take right quick.

[mbob]

The latest NY'r has a pretty good piece about boomers at the threshold of early old age. Robert McNamara figures large in the story, as someone who ceaselessly travels the globe "....deploring" the conditions of the less fortunate.

Maybe Alan, Robert and Bono can all assemble to deplore at the same time before they retire for a nice 4 star dinner and a decent Chateau something or other '48.

Hey, it's not easy being a pundit. YOU try hours in front of a mirror practicing "nyah nyah got away with it" over and over and over again.

[JohnnyB]

If the housing market is the sinking Titanic of overleveraged assets (which it is), Greenspan was just the tip of the investment banking system iceberg. While his directives and policies directly supported the largest creation and distribution of wealth - through fraudulent leveraging schemes to those top 1% of income earners (and in the history of mankind) – he did not run the “show” by himself.

Now it’s like he’s doing the in-your-face duck walk along the carnival’s oral-shooting gallery… quacking and quacking the same garbage in defense of the indefensible while we take pock shots at him. When we hit him tween the eyes with truth, he snaps right back up and says we missed… no big stuffed teddy for you.

Greenspan ENCOURAGED and PROMOTED unregulated derivatives and almost unlimited free money to banks while putting the worst king of "sage" face, infused with twisted, nonsensical and fundamentally flawed rhetoric, in his communications.

He either has no sense at all of the damage he’s reaped on the entire middle class or he does know and doesn’t give a rat’s ass. I’d chose the latter.

And Clinton had the audacity to suggest bringing him back into the “official fold” to help “solve” this mess FOR the middle class that she purports to represent. Didn’t the previous Clinton repeal the Glass-Steagall Act which released the final floodgates of unregulated, overleveraged debt creation for the mega wealthy? Yes, indeed…

[Hank Venture]

We must have the same crappy TW DVR. In this case Youtube will give you the limited satisfaction of watching the ending (but already knowing how it comes out).

And you aren't the only grump today, Peter. They merged the two LAT sports blogs for UCLA and USC, and the feedback has been . . . less than positive. Are they going to merge LA LAND with the NAR blog? That would be sweet.

As for Greenspan, how many politicians (and don't think for a moment he wasn't in politics) spend their golden years admitting their mistakes? Your time is better spent getting mad at your cable company.

[MyLessThanPrimeBeef]

Did he say the misjudgments of the investment community?

Isn't that an attack on capitalism? On the very foundation of this country that the market is always right?

Someone should remind Edith 'je ne regrette rien' Greedspan that he did say some fabulous things about those trillion dollars worth of derivatives that brought down Bear Stearns.

Thanks to him, the dollar is tanking now. But Clinton probably won't have to worry too much about it if most of his speaking fees are denominated in Yuan.

[NationalBubble.com]

hey folks, some good news.

It looks like Bush is against the current version of the housing bailout bill. Let's fight this bill. If enough people call congress, we might be able to stop it.

http://tinyurl.com/6j42wy

[John Oldenkamp]

Alan: Please. Shut up. Go away. Enough already. You were never the seer your reputation made you out to be. You are not a rock star on a comeback tour. The only way you can help now is to vanish!

[Doug Terry at terryreport.com]

It is very difficult to regulate insanity, which is what the housing market was in many urban markets, including here in the DC area, up until 2005. Too much money was chasing the mortgage taking public, so the guys on the lower end started shoveling money out the door like corn flakes. Prices went way, way up and everybody had a big party. Houses around ours sold within hours of going on the market, usually with bid up prices. Someone could have slowed this all down, just by saying a few words. Greenspan or Bush would have been the likely suspects. But, they remained silent on the issue.

[Digitalian]

What will Greenspan claim next? That he was under sniper fire while the tech, housing, and credit bubbles were inflating? He is a bald faced liar if he says he is not at all responsible for the credit/housing bubble. It is well documented that he openly supported the idea of the lending industry developing "alternatives" to the 30 year fixed mortgage. He also on more than one occasion dismissed concerns about the declining savings rate because according to him it did not take into account the equity people had in their homes.
The man was a menace to the financial well being of the hard working, economically responsible people in this country.

[Ray]

Greenspan was so busy being the "maestro" that he forgot to do key parts of his job. Now he's a memoir-writing, Davos-attending, private jet-flying titan now busy to take responsibility for his inactivity. He's another member of the "How we were supposed to know it would be this bad" crowd. Harry Reid had it right: He's a political hack.

[Lou]

Alan Greenspan actually said that homeowners are better off with a 1 year ARM than a 30 year fixed because they were throwing away tens of thousands of dollars.

The head of the central bank of the biggest economy said that? Isn't that like the Pope suggesting that underage teenage girls get pregnant?

[Rich]

Okay, you're right, it is annoying to have to see him back in the news mix, but I agree with his basic point--if we agree on the basic argument against him, that lowering interest rates alone was a bad policy because it made a bubble inevitable. People who are arguing that line don't seem to know how much speculative pricing was built up by outright crime and fraud, which belongs to the FBI and not the FED to sort out, and how much was exacerbated by institutional lenders failing to adhere to their industry standards, as the man says. I'm not sure if Roger above is right that Greenspan should get all the blame because the oversight of regulation is the FED's; the SEC and Treasury fit in there somewhere. Without the fraud and substandard practices the FED interest rate policies in his era would not have led to the speculative runup in housing prices at the level that broke the camel's back this time around.

To that extent that any fiscal conservative is against even reasonable government regulation of business, they would be responsible for our current mess. Since unfettered market action was the theme and mantra of his era, I'm not sure Greenspan is more to blame than Clinton or Gingrich or Mozilo...

[Guido]

Careful Peter, please. You know you are starting to sound like a communist.

[Robert]

Peter Viles is about as qualified to judge Alan Greenspan's intellect as an ant is to judge mine! You are nobody Mr. Viles!

[Uncle Billy Climbs Mont Pelerin]

Dear Mr. Greenspan,

You're old, you don't seem to be very angry at the world, and you probably don't need the money unless some capitol mobster is shaking you down, so please just sit down, shut up, and confess. You do *not* have a reputation to protect anymore, and you can do a lot of good by admitting that "free markets", on earth at least, lead to catastrophe. We need a plan, we need serious regulation. Fed out, Complexity out, Keynes in.

"If you put two economists in a room, you get two opinions, unless one of them is Lord Keynes, in which case you get three opinions." -- Churchill

"If you put two economists in a room, you get two opinions, unless one of them is Alan Greenspan, in which case you get a very large bill for services." -- Anonymous

[cody mccall]

Greenspan is one of those self-important types who manage to scam us all by moving his lips to form utterances that may seem pithy and deep but are actually opaque obfuscations meant to confuse rather than communicate. He is skilled at polysyllabic babblings with no particular meaning. Filigreed verbosity about arcane topics. Nice gig and it pays very well.

[MyLessThanPrimeBeef]

And continuing Edith Greedspam's tradition of giving us the best an idiotocracy can buy, perhaps because we have the blind following the blind (apparently the Egyptian alligator dung didn't help), Bin Lackey's Fed showed 'no indication of any debate on this unprecedented move,' according to CNNMoney on their report of the meeting on March 18, 2008, a day after 'the day that shall live in infamy.'

http://money.cnn.com/2008/04/08/news/economy/
fed_minutes/index.htm?cnn=yes

[Johnny]

You always have to tape the following show in case of overtime or in this case a long game plus OT. Of course it's confusing when you look at the list of recorded programs and it says "News at 10" but at least you have it there if you need it.

[Big Mean Dog]

Peter, great post except why do you regret voting for Bill Clinton? Just because he became rich? The world would be a lot different and I believe better place if he'd been in office on 9/11.

[Raul]

Greenspan is the genius, that learned to talk and dont say anything, just like Nostradamus. you would have to find out, what he was trying to say, and the intelectuals did not want to look like, they did not understood. Now that the high and mighty people, pay for his speeches, he forgot how to say nothing, and he is looking like a regular guy.

[Uncle Billy Climbs Mont Pelerin]

Krugman of NYTimes references a post on Naked Capitallism : http://tinyurl.com/66ns6r

This is a good look at everything wrong with Greenspanism. The author, Yves Smith, calls attention to that thing I've been harping about for a while: The Fed having discontinued in '06, reporting of the M3 money supply numbers.

If we assume that that Greenspan is an intelligent man and that he knew what would happen with our economy ahead of time, we have to ask why. Did he personally profit from this, or his family? Maybe he's some sort of globalist visionary that believes the U.S. must be brought to its knees for the world to be on more of an equal playing field? What? I just don't get it.