Greenspan is in favor of regulation = me being skeptical
F-you is what I have to say to that guy. He was all about Freemarket and deregulation…until the economy collapsed and bankrupted Iceland and a few other countries then sent our country to the brink of ruin and aided a housing bubble that has essentially screwed millions of people out of their jobs and home.
Now he is in favor of regulation. This isn’t golf, you don’t get a mulligan dickhead. At what point does he become a fraud? Or at what point do the right people (our liberal media) prop him up as the perfect example of someone that now gets that a freemarket is not possible.
Humans are weak.
Color me skeptical as well. However, I think it’s probably going to take someone like Greenspan to get needed reforms. So I hope he’s serious and if so, welcome to the dark side.
There is a really interesting (at least to me) discussion going on between two schools of thought in economics. Krugman wrote about it this month, but it’s been discussed amongst the eggheads for a long time.
Suffice it to say that one school (the freshwater school, led by economic departments in the Great Lakes area, including Minnesota and U of Chicago) are laissez faire/libertarian/Greenspanish. They push the view that recessions/unemployment/etc are good Darwinian developments, that do constructive destruction (out with those buggy-whip manufacturers), and that government is ineffective at smoothing the business cycle.
The saltwater school, led by econ depts on the coasts (princeton, yale, berkley, etc), holds that central banks and governments have a useful role in smoothing the economy. Bernanke is in the camp, and we saw the results in the handling of the recent economic crisis.