Tom di Lorenzo at Lew Rockwell blog has this:
“Following Alan Greenspan’s pathetic “don’t blame me” speeches and books, various Fed branches have parroted his view that the Greenspan Depression we are in was caused by thrifty Orientals whose savings drove down interest rates. So imagine my surprise upon receiving a hard copy of a Dallas Fed publicaton entitled “Taming the Credit Cycle by Limiting High-Risk Lending” and reading that “The present troubles emerged to a large extent from the growing use of hybrid adjustable-rate mortgages . . .” Huh? What happened to The New Yellow Peril?
There is no mention at all — not one word — of the role of Fed monetary policy in creating the housing bubble. The culprits, say these self-serving excuse makers (the author is Jeffrey W. Gunther), are “lightly regulated institutions” that are in need of the Fed’s “disciplining force.”
My Conment
Mr. di Lorenzo can relax – this new tack does nothing to exonerate Greenspan. Look at this USA Today piece from early 2004, when housing was already showing bubbl-y tendencies:
“He [Greenspan] said a Fed study suggested many homeowners could have saved tens of thousands of dollars in the last decade if they had ARMs. Those savings would not have been realized, however, had interest rates shot up.
“American consumers might benefit if lenders provided greater mortgage product alternatives to the traditional fixed-rate mortgage,” Greenspan said.”
Read through the whole piece and it’s clear that American house buyers actually “preferred the stability” of the traditional fixed rate mortgages. In other words, it was only a concerted PR effort by Greenspan & Co. that changed people’s tastes in this.
Let that put an end to any moralizing of this issue. Yes – rampant consumerism and debt binging exacerbated the problem. But the problem wasn’t caused by some moral defect in American consumers. It was caused by policies deliberately pushed by the federal government in the hope that the consumer would succumb. The chairman of the Federal Reserve thus acted no differently from any confidence man or grifter who spots a mark (a naive, uninformed person easy to manipulate), then sets about winning the mark’s confidence before baiting the trap….
You can see the chairman’s own words to the national association of credit unions on February 23, 2004. (Skip down to the last 2-3 paragraphs to catch the gist)
And now, just like any con man, the Fed chairman too blames his victims.
They had it coming to them...