Politics

Hey, Greenspan, You're Not Helping

By Matt Cooper

Alan Greenspan tries to distance himself from the current financial mess in remarks today. I read his remarks in the middle of the night and will give them another read later. Amidst the turgid prose he seems to blame the whole thing on poor credit risk models that don't take into account the oddities of human behavior. Uh, wouldn't have been better if we'd had some regulation as the subprime market grew? The problem wasn't the low interest rates, which some have unfairly blamed, for being the cause of all of this. It was the total lack of regulation that allowed a crazed market to grow crazily. What's worse, the Washington system of regulation of the credit markets, built for an age when Thurston Howell was the typical millionaire has grown into a wild, unchecked casino that the Nevada Gaming Commission would never tolerate. Greenspan isn't wrong to blame the credit modeling for some of this but the fault, dear Alan, lies elsewhere....

Full post as published by Portfolio.com: Capital on March 17, 2008 (boomark / email).