andrea mitchell asked hubby about this?Wall Street’s Crisis: What Greenspan Got Wrong

she is a reporter on m$nbc...




The “Greenspan put” was analysts’ shorthand for investors’ faith that the Fed would keep the capital markets functioning no matter what. The Fed’s policy was clear: to restrain growth of an asset bubble, it would take only small steps, such as warning investors some asset prices might fall; but after a bubble burst, it would use all the tools available to stabilize the markets. Greenspan argued that intentionally bursting a bubble would heavily damage the economy. “Instead of trying to contain a putative bubble by drastic actions with largely unpredictable consequences,” he said in 2004, when housing prices were ballooning, “we chose . . . to focus on policies ‘to mitigate the fallout when it occurs and, hopefully, ease the transition to the next expansion.’”

This asymmetric policy—allowing unrestrained growth, then working hard to cushion the impact of a bust—raised the question of “moral hazard”: did the policy encourage investors and financial institutions to gamble because their upside was unlimited while the full power and influence of the Fed protected their downside (at least against catastrophic losses)? Greenspan himself warned about this in a 2005 speech, noting that higher asset prices were “in part the indirect result of investors accepting lower compensation for risk” and cautioning that “newly abundant liquidity can readily disappear.” Yet the only real action would be an upward march of the federal funds rate that had begun in the summer of 2004, although, as he pointed out in the same 2005 speech, this had little effect.

And the markets were undeterred. “We had convinced ourselves that we were in a less risky world,” former Federal Reserve governor and National Economic Council director under President George W. Bush Lawrence Lindsey told the Commission. “And how should any rational investor respond to a less risky world? They should lay on more risk.

http://www.frumforum.com/the-mortgage-meltdown-what-greenspan-got-wrong