Posted on 09/15/2007 4:50:56 AM PDT by indcons
Greenspan was appointed by President Reagan and served until 2006. During that time span he served three Republican presidents and one democrat president. To characterize him as a Clinton lackey is to intentionally distort the facts.
Other than those facts being evident, the entire discussion is based on one small portion from his book. Unless one has read the entire book it is impossible to determine the tenor of the book.
Andrea busting his balls.
It's true Greenspan served Republican Presidents, and may once have believed in Randian capitalism. But he's an old man now, and many an old warrior has gone wobbly and socialist near the end. Look at George Kennan.
Greenspan married Andrea Mitchell, a Clinton sycophant, in 1997, which was deep in the dark night of the Clinton Experience. We all know how much spine old guys have after marrying a younger woman. My observation is that, for most of the Bush administration, he has seemed eager to embarrass the President with his pronouncements, although, to his credit, I gather he supported tax cuts.
One Drudge headline alleges Greenspan's book praises Clinton. . .
Yes, and how does that not make him a Bush bashing Clinton lackey? You serve the President you have. Bloomberg says he is a Republican also.
Several supreme court justices were appointed by Reagan and turned out to be rotten in the extreme.
Greenspan caused the dot-com bomb and the crash of 2000 with his policies. Bush bashing does not become him, but I understand. If you are in the business of selling books and want to make the sale, BDS is fashionable. Read the daily kooks and see what they think.
What Fed policies lead to the dot.com bubble bursting?
He warned about excessive exuberance that was coming from the tech/dot.com sector.
Your understanding of economics is abysmally pathetic. There is absolutely nothing inflationary about taxes. What is inflationary is Greenspan's printing of zillions of dollars of cheap FR loans to the treasury and to wall street.
I agree that the economic policies of administrations since about the time Johnson took office has been a disaster, but Greenspan merely aided and abetted that disaster by printing the money that the government needs.
If you understood anything about economics you would understand that it is not tax policy that affects inflation, but the monetary policy of the federal reserve.
Warning is nothing. Monetary policy is everything. Greenspan ran a more liberal printing press than the washington post.
The only thing the FR chairman controls is monetary policy. He ran the printing presses at full tilt. This is more an irresponsible behavior than a responsible conservative behavior. A neo-conservative (Milton Friedman) would print money no faster than the rate of economic growth (3-4% vs 13 %). A true conservative would burn paper money and put us back on the gold standard.
You can bet that not a word of that will every get any ink!
“A true conservative would burn paper money and put us back on the gold standard.”
If a person talks enough they will tell you what they really think. Your quote above reflects reactionary thought, not conservative thought.
Think Bush nourished. . .which became a 'spoiling' of sorts; a sick Country. . .as one might a sick patient. Extraordinary times such as an 'enemy attack' (and natural disasters; beyond usual numbers and as well, beyond our imagination) have been markers for this President 's tenure.
Our Country did not collapse into an economic abyss and while we have paid a price for these financial judgments and MIS-judgments (sure; there is a downside to indiscriminate 'buying') - think things could have been much worse; without the spoiling.
Many debating the political 'chicken/egg' aspects of 9/11; but at the starting point of our recovery; there was only a sick 'chicken' to consider. . .
So; okay, Repubs overdid it. . .worse could have happened.
First, I am not advocating a gold standard, but I am not sure what is reactionary about establishing a standard for the value of money or standards for anything else. I did not know, for instance, that Ludwig von Mises was considered a reactionary. It is socialists who like to undermine standards, not conservatives. I know that most people have been brainwashed to think that a gold standard is somehow advocated by loons, but much of the enormous growth of the US occurred while we were on a gold standard. The existence of a gold standard does not prohibit the printing, circulation of and reliance on paper money. It merely makes it difficult for a governments to print excess quantities of it thereby devaluing the value of the paper currency.
For the most part, under a gold standard, people don't have a preference for holding gold over paper money, and the lines only start forming at the gold window when people lose confidence in the government and the currency that they are circulating.
If you think that there is a lot of confidence in the value of the printed US dollar you have not been paying attention to exchange rates over the last weeks, months or years.
Your understanding of my point is abysmally pathetic.
Never liked Greenspan.
He always struck me as a smarmy know-it-all who unabashedly supportive of all things liberal.
The real kicker is how he eventually stabbed ‘conservative’ Repubs in the back, after they boosted and promoted him to the pinnacle of financial power.
“We invaded Iraq for oil”, Greenspan supposedly says in his new book.
That statement right there puts him on the list of total a-holes of the 20th and 21st centuries, and I hope the Republicans grow some balls — stand up and tar him as the JERK that he is.
The jerk genius who was SO SMART he failed to realize that he was mostly responsible for the current sub-prime problem.
The jerk genius who was so smart he promoted a phony smoke & mirror dot.com stock market balloon which coincentally popped at the end of his Democrap bud Clinton’s term.
Von Mises, the father of Austrian economic thought was a conservative without a doubt but the notion that the gold standard is a panacea to economic woes is invalid in my opinion.
Greenspan’s criticism of “W” is more relevant to economic stability than a set value of the currency. He favored tax cuts but stated they must be off set by a reduction in spending or that an increase in spending must be off set by a tax increase.
He hasn’t fallen into the camp that now says deficits are meaningless. I think that notion is a prime factor in debasing the Greenback.
I did not misunderstand your point. Your claim was that taxes are inflationary. they are not. They are confiscatory, but not per se inflationary. Taxes don’t raise the cost of a loaf of bread. They merely reallocate the wherewithal to purchase it. Inflation comes about when greenspan hands out printed dollars, meaning that your earned dollar to purchase a loaf of bread is no longer sufficient because someone else can bid two unearned dollars for the same loaf.
What I am arguing is Greenspan’s credentials as a conservative. His statements on monetary policy are irrelevant. It is his actual behavior that matters and Greenspan was more liberal with the monetary printing press than virtually any FR chairman in history. M3, the measure of broad money and indicator of the FR work to expand credit was rising so rapidly that the FR stopped publishing the number.
I laugh at Democrats who say Bush has increased spending too much. Yet they are the same ones who want the federal government to control our lives from birth to death. How do they think this will be accomplished without spending more $$??
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