I’m reading “Alan Greenspan, Fed Chairman Through Prosperity and Crisis, Dies at 100/The pre-eminent economic policymaker of his time and a skilled political operator, he favored market-friendly stances that would later come to be associated with destructive financial forces” (NYT).

Even as Mr. Greenspan skillfully managed interest rates in a way that kept the economy humming along, he remained leery of confronting a danger he well recognized: that the low-inflation, easy-money environment he had helped create was putting the United States at risk by fueling unsustainable investment booms. And he remained reluctant to act as banks and investment firms adopted complex new trading techniques that would come to wreak great damage. At the Fed, he was remarkably successful at what he considered the central banker’s primary task of holding down inflation. He also helped the United States deal with periodic shocks, including a stock market crash just weeks after he took office, the near-meltdown of Asian financial markets a decade later and the aftereffects of the 2001 terrorist attacks….

From my blog archive:

October 23, 2008

“A flaw in the model that I perceived is the critical functioning structure that defines how the world works.”

Greenspan says oops.

And there was a time when I was reading Greenspan’s autobiography:

Meanwhile, Alan Greenspan’s book “The Age of Turbulence” lavishes praise on Bill Clinton for his intellect (especially for his grasp of economics and his perception of how things would change in the future). Greenspan classes Bill Clinton with the smartest of all the Presidents he has known: Richard Nixon. Which brings us back to the point that “smartest” doesn’t encapsulate what you really want in a President. 

And there was a time when Alan Greenspan was reading Ayn Rand:

“‘Atlas Shrugged’ is a celebration of life and happiness.”

“Justice is unrelenting. Creative individuals and undeviating purpose and rationality achieve joy and fulfillment. Parasites who persistently avoid either purpose or reason perish as they should.”

So wrote Alan Greenspan in a letter to the editor of the NYT in 1957, the year the book was published and denounced by the newspaper as “written out of hate.”