Cincinnatus. George Washington.

Or are they so rare that I’m making your point for you?

We need more Cincinnati.

Ha. That is the biggest friggin lie I have ever heard.

Should be more like ‘as an insider I decided to engage in crony capitalism under the guise of a free market capitalist’.

Any free market is based on competition. The Fed is not interested in competition nor is any insider.

Greenspan explains all in his 2007 book AGE OF TURBULENCE.

“By the time I joined Richard Nixon’s campaign for the presidency in 1968, I had long since decided to engage in efforts to advance free-market capitalism as an insider, rather than as a critical pamphleteer. When I agreed to accept the nomination as chairman of the president’s Council of Economic Advisors, I knew I would have to pledge to uphold not only the Constitution but also the laws of the land, many of which I thought were wrong. It did not go without notice that Ayn Rand stood beside me as I took the oath of office. I’m greatful for the influence she had on my life. I was intellectually limited until I met her.”

So Greenspan headed an organization that had responsibilities he thought were best handled by the market (whatever that means when comes to taking huge risks with other peoples money to earn a cool $600 million in 6 years as was the case with Lehman’s CEO). The result were inevitable. Greenspan has since admitted he was wrong and that people really do things that can endanger the companies they are responsible for.

Now how surprising is that….. and on top of that whocouldaknowed….

U.S. public debt is piling up and the role of government is expanding at an alarming rate, and we’re fighting the last war…feeling good by saying ‘told ya so’.

So we’re headed for a $20 trillion dollar public debt, years of woefully under-funded entitlement programs, a sinking dollar, and the likelihood of much higher taxes. But hey, why worry about little things like that?

AT makes a good point: “”Brooksley Born was in an EPIC battle with Alan Greenspan.” C’mon. An epic battle? How epic? What happened. How many “testy” memos did they send to each other? How many meetings did they really have?”

and, really, Whare was the MSM when she was making this noise about ” potential for economic meltdown in the late 1990s”?

she’s being turned into Tool..

An epic battle is when you’re dropping 100′s of thousand of troops at Normandy, or you’re fighting lions in a Coliseum….that’s epic. Bureacrats arguing about OTC derivatives cannot be epic.

What would have really changed if they had “cleared” all these transactions on an exchange and it was “regulated?” Traders like AIG or GS or whomever would have had to post some collateral? Big deal. Nothing would have prevented the bubble. The losses would have been dispersed more widely, rather than concentrated in larger folks like AIG. It would have made little difference.

So, the last thing I want to watch is some program talking about how “courageous” this particular woman was in “sounding off” against the potential evils of the shadowy marketplace. There were lots of warnings and lots of smart people sounding off on the housing/credit/derivative bubble. Should we give them all awards. The cold hard reality is that in a mania/bubble, the masses ignore the warning. Almost everyone is oblivious to the risks….That’s just way it is. It will never change.

If Ghandi had started his own holocaust , wouldn’t we find it a bit strange?

If you read his essays you would find all the remedies, to the crisis which he really played a major role in creating. I guess i’m glas he’s on the board at PIMCO now..

And God knows if you were saying it in the ’90s you were really a crackpot that could be marginalized for your loony rantings and pessimism. Hey, just look at what the stock market was doing. How could things be truly bad underneath? /snark, again/