“I was wrong 30% of the time, and there were an awful lot of mistakes in 21 years”.
‘Alan Greenspan admits to the U.S. Financial Inquiry Commission that his tenure as U.S. Federal Reserve Board boss had plenty of missteps-but causing the financial crisis wasn’t one of them.’
Globe and Mail April 10, 2010
Alan Greenspan was an acolyte of Milton Friedman and The Chicago School. Milton Friedman and the Chicago School are famous (or infamous depending on your looking glass) for the advocacy and academic justification for total free markets, deregulation and privatization of all government programs excepting law and order and the military. Commonly now known as Globalization. Friedman, an obscure economics professor at the U. of Chicago in the fifties and sixties acheived notariety by convincing General Augusto Pinochet of Argentina in 1972, after a coup d’ etat, to implement the Chicago School’s prescriptions of Privitization, Deregulation and ‘open markets’. It was a disaster in Argentina and the rest of the Southern Cone moving on to Poland and the Eastern Block after the fall of the USSR in 91. With the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank taking up the Friedman ‘Shock and Awe’ strategy this economic determinist doctrine put the third world into the huge debt situation it is in today and rebelling against. And yet, despite the failures and later bailouts using a mixed economic template (as in Canada), this brutal experiment crushing tens of millions of people world wide still flies high if you read the business pages. That is up until the crash of 2008/2009. For a history of this period of rapaciousness see Naomi Klein’s THE SHOCK DOCTRINE, The Rise of Disaster Capitalism and any number of books by Chris Hedges, Chalmers Johnson and former World Bank Chief Economist Joseph Stiglitz to name a few.
If Milton Friedman was the architect, Alan Greenspan was the general contractor/engineer in the United States. As the Federal Reserve Chairman for 21 years and four President’s Mr. Greenspan presided over the deregulation/international corporatization of the financial markets, the de-industrialization of American manufacturing, the privatization of numerous government functions including the American military, the flat lining of wage earners income (wages today adjusted for inflation are at 1971 levels), and last but not least the ‘housing bubble’ of 08/09.
The Federal Reserve Chairman of the United States is the most powerful economic position in the world. If the Chairman decides to focus on employment or inflation, that decision ripples throughout the world. Mr. Greenspan’s small government/leave it to the markets doctrine (neo-conservative or neo-liberal depending on your prism) coincided perfectly with Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, the Republican Congress in 1994 run by Newt Gingrich and Phil Gramn and of course G.W. Bush. Despite Mr. Greenspan preaching fiscal responsibility, especially under democratic president’s, Greenspan was able to manipulate these deficits with manuvers like raising payroll taxes ( see Ravi Batra’s GREENSPAN’S FRAUD ) for the worker and lower taxes for corporations and continue to pile up the debt.
Mr. Greenspan recently presented a report to the Brookings Institute in Washington apologizing for not grasping the extent of the housing bubble and not dealing with the size of ‘to big to fail’ financial institutions. He also recommends stronger regulation and enforcement of collateral and capital requirements, a limit or ban on concentrated bank lending and get this, compelling extra large financial institutions or mega banks to develop ‘living wills’, that specify how they are to be liquidated in an orderly way. I think that’s more than an apology. It’s a recantation of aspects of international american corporatism.
The point being that when Alan Greenspan spoke the world waited with baited breath. It led every newscast and was front page news as the entrails of Greenspans inegmatic economic mystery speak was gone over like an archeological site. Mr. Greenspan apologizes or recants aspects of the doctrine accepting regulation and oversite and he gets the back page of the New York Times and Globe and Mail etc. and nary a word in the Media.
The article in the New York Times assigned little historical context to the Greenspan Reign. And this is how people who do great harm escape the consequences of their action’s. In the 21st Century there is no accountability for the elite’s actions. Certainly not from the media unless you commit adultery or are soliciting men in an airport. It’s not just the corporate Media. Somehow the juggernaut of Economics has been legitimized as the centre of humanity’s existence. Just watch the bank commercials airing now.
We have internalized the idea that we are helpless in front of the grand mathematics of a psuedo science called economic determinism. Learned helplessness is what we are inculcated with and it’s hero’s are the Alan Greenspan’s, Ronald Reagan’s and trading floor ‘geniuses’ that send a dollar around the world and it comes back as 100,000.00 dollars thirty minutes later without producing anything productive.
Robert McNamara, brilliant technocrat and Secretary of Defence during the Vietnam War, recanted in a documentary (the name of the doc escapes me right now) that was chilling in Mr. McNamara’s ability to dissociate himself from the carnage. He new he had done a great disservice to millions of Vietnamese and Americans. Yet he somehow could justify the ignorance of not knowing the history of the country he was invading or in Freidman/Greenspan’s case, more interested in proving a theory of mass impoverishment/oligarchic wealth or to put it another way: socialize the debt and privatize the wealth.
Mr. Greenspan is a technocrat versed in the use of and the abuse of power, divorced from the suffering he and ‘Uncle Milty’ have perpetrated. The business media colludes in the enterprize. What McNamara, ‘Uncle Milty and Greenspan practice is a kind of intricate bestiality reinforceing each, seldom being held accountable by the citizenry because in essence we have no voice or participation any more.
Or do We?