What is this "responsible" you speak of? Isn't that for foreigners and little people?

What a lying piece of shit

That's a bit unparliamentary, Jerome, whether feelings run high or not...

Not really for the ET front page IMHO.

Just to say that due to a bad case of lap top mobility this morning that it was me, rather than Solveig, concerning "Brownspan" (ie Greenspan as a ....).

She may well contribute a Norwegian epithet or two...

Modern conservatives engage in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy: the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.Galbraith

Hmmm, one of you is right, and one of you has an $8.5 million book deal.

Which one of you will be listened to more?

There's no such thing as original sin - Elvis Costello

Mr Alan Greenspan is a mendacious stool.

When locusts move on, they leave nothing behind

Unfortunately we do not control the organs of bullshit that so widely pollute the public media space, so this man, who had a book written about him titled 'Maestro' (excuse me while I go clear up my own vomit ...) is still more or less treated as some sort of skinny, aged, frail, diminutive, uber-Hercules of the intellectual and financial realms by the press. As far as I see, anyway.

This is of course one aspect of a more general problem, namely of the ever-present bulldust that poses as conventional wisdom. I literally cannot bear to endure mainstream media ... which is why I most lurk places like ET.

I turned on the TV this morning to find out that in his new book, Greenspan blames the Republicans for irresponsible spending and says we went to war in Iraq because of oil.

Like watching house full of children burn down and calling the fire department the next day.

It really really pisses me off that everyone in our gov't. is such a tool that they have to retire before acknowledging very simple truths.  

It also really really pisses me off that we've been saying these things for oh 7 years and we're labelled insane lefties, but when it turns our that, er, we're right, it's Greenspan who legitimizes our position.  Unbelievable.  

"Pretending that you already know the answer when you don't is not actually very helpful." ~Migeru.

I know I mentioned this last night but Ian Welsh eviscerated Greenspan on FireDogLake last night.

You should read it in full but a few choice quotes below

Randians generally figure that any money you got, you got all on your own, and you therefore deserve all of it. The government is a leech for taking it away to give to less productive people, because rich people are generally the most productive contributors and should not be disincentivised from working hard. Tax cuts on the rich are a very Randian thing to do. And so Greenspan backed them ......................

Now, it's definitely true that the sub-prime mess and the housing bubble weren't just caused by Fed policy. But it's also true that those 3 years at generational lows certainly kick-started it, gestated and got it growing at a ferocious rate. I was writing about the coming housing bubble back in 2002 (on the old Atlantic Monthly forums) - it was clear what the policies would do. And Greenspan knew too - he implicitly admits it above with his talk about how wonderful more home ownership would be because it would help increase property rights by altering politics. Property rights, of course, are another Randian bugaboo. Not that they aren't important, but there's a reason why they aren't in the Constitution, why governments are allowed to seize property, and so on. Greenspan kept rates low longer than made sense due to ideological reasons. And he pushed it hard ......................

For him, now, to say that he somehow didn't mean it, or that he was, behind the scenes, urging caution, or that he was hoodwinked, is sophistry of the most pathetic kind. He was not economically naive. He had the skills not to be taken in. If he was taken in, he was taken in because he wanted to be taken in. And right up to 2004 he can be seen, having not learned his lesson, even as Bush had vetoed no spending bills at all, still using his reputation to try and help push through Bush administration policies.

There have been a lot of people writing books and articles of late, in which they throw Bush over the bus in an attempt to save their reputation. (Colin Powell, are you listening?) In almost every case, they did nothing when they had the power; had the influence; had the opportunity to actually made a difference.

Greenspan is nothing but another rat fleeing the sinking S.S. Bush in an attempt to save his reputation for posterity. He doesn't deserve space on the life raft. Men like Treasury Secretary O'Neill, who wrote their books while it still mattered, when it still took guts, when it might have made a difference; they deserve a hand up. Greenspan deserves to go down with the ship.

keep to the Fen Causeway

considering how rarely jerome uses obscenities to communicate, i fins the occasions when they do emerge as apropos.

in this case even measured!

behold the face of a lickspittled toad, rich, old, and rightly reviled.

his turning a conveniently blind eye when his reputation could have enabled his word to have stopping power on this runaway doomtrain.

ditto powell, hear, hear.

he was their willing collaborator, and without attaching electrodes or firing a shot, has done as much to heap misery on the poor as bush/cheny, whose machine could not have done a hundredth of the domestic damage without the well-oiled cog of his financial policies.

why anyone would want to suffer through 500 pages from this old 'lying shit' is entirely beyond my wildest imagination.

it was bad enough seeing him pontificate these last years, pretending we were in the middle of the road, with three wheels off the cliff.

perfect reflection of the 'end times', when humans like this are given 8.5 mill to revise their personal histories, and lionised as sages...

false profits indeed.

"The question facing world leaders today is not what to do. It is whether to do it." James Galbraith