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The Times absolutely unloads on Alan Greenspan (whom the business press lionized for decades) in a huge page-one piece, blaming him for a blind faith in non-regulation of markets—particularly involving derivatives— that helped created the financial crisis.
And his views held the greatest sway in debates about the regulation and use of derivatives — exotic contracts that promised to protect investors from losses, thereby stimulating riskier practices that led to the financial crisis. For more than a decade, Alan Greenspan has fiercely objected whenever derivatives have come under scrutiny in Congress or on Wall Street.
âWhat we have found over the years in the marketplace is that derivatives have been an extraordinarily useful vehicle to transfer risk from those who shouldnât be taking it to those who are willing to and are capable of doing so,â Mr. Greenspan told the Senate Banking Committee in 2003. âWe think it would be a mistakeâ to more deeply regulate the contracts, he added.
The NYT doesnât forget that the Clinton Administration was responsible for this, too. Clintonâs Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, who was instrumental in implementing the deregulatory philosophy in the 1990s, looks very bad here:
Mr. Rubin, now a senior executive at the banking giant Citigroup, says that he favored regulating derivatives — particularly increasing potential loss reserves — but that he saw no way of doing so while he was running the Treasury.
âAll of the forces in the system were arrayed against it,â he said. âThe industry certainly didnât want any increase in these requirements. There was no potential for mobilizing public opinion.â
This story is part of the paperâs âThe Reckoningâ series, which has been excellent so far. This one is a must read, top to bottom.
Here Sir Alan sums up his philosophy for Congress:
âThere is nothing involved in federal regulation per se which makes it superior to market regulation.â
The consequences of the Greenspan Era—and donât forget his easy-money policy, which played the biggest role—just in todayâs papers include the Fed having to give the effectively nationalized AIG $38 billion to stay afloat (thatâs on top of the $85 billion it gave it a few weeks ago), and considering taking big stakes in the nationâs biggest banks to keep them afloat. Surely he would have preferred a little regulation to having government all over the means of production.
The Journal looks at Californiaâs deepening recession to show what the rest of the country faces. Letâs hope it doesnât result in all fifty states running to the federal government for emergency multi-billion dollar loans.
But even before the most recent blows to the national economy, Californians were feeling the downward drag of a consumer-led recession — in which shrinking home values caused people to rein in their spending, fueling unemployment and, in turn, sparking further spending cuts and joblessness.
Economist Nouriel Roubini, in Forbes, gives four actions governments need to take to prevent a depression, including guaranteeing all bank deposits, injecting capital into banks, and passing a massive economic stimulus package.
At this point, the U.S., the advanced economies (and now most likely even some emerging market economies) will experience an ugly recession and an ugly financial and banking crisis—regardless of what we do from now on. We are already now in a global recession that is getting worse by the day. What radical policy action can only do is to prevent what will now be an ugly and nasty two-year recession and financial crisis from turning into a decade-long economic depression.
Michael A. Hiltzik of the LA Times goes out on a limb to ask whether the stock market is ready to rebound. Thatâs a limb I wouldnât want to test right now.
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