What do you mean foxes can’t guard the henhouse?
The inmates can’t run the asylum? … Corporations can’t self-regulate?
I’m shocked, shocked, I tell you!!
In opening statements, Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., committee chairman, said the current economic crisis could have been prevented “if regulators had paid more attention and intervened with responsible legislation. The list of regulatory mistakes and misjudgments is long and the cost to taxpayers and the economy is staggering.”
Waxman put Greenspan on the spot, asking if he made any mistakes during his tenure as Federal Reserve chairman that may have contributed to the mortgage crisis.
Greenspan said he made a mistake in presuming that lenders themselves were more capable than regulators of protecting their finances. He said he was “shocked” when that system “broke down.”
“I still do not understand exactly how it happened,” said Greenspan.
Well… you see, Mr. Greenspan, it’s like this…. human nature by default is self-obsessed and greedy. We must assume that those who know they won’t be caught will do things that benefit themselves, ignoring the cost to others. We need checks and balances built into the system. When you take those away, you see the wreckage before you as an illustration of the end result.
Will this lesson take? Nah, I give it ….oh… another twenty years or so before we hear the pleading for deregulation again… long enough for the next generation of neocons to spawn and for voters to forget.
crossposted at Rants from the Rookery
October 23rd, 2008 at 11:29 am
Greenspan warns unemployment will rise further…
Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan said Thursday the current financial crisis is a “once…
October 23rd, 2008 at 1:45 pm
Quite something your Mr Greenspan. The way I understood his speech it wasn’t his fault at all but rather those goofy elitist intellectual snobs like Nobel Prize Winner in Economics in 1997, Myron Scholes. And this had nothing to do with his trying to overcook the economy for W while two wars were going on and commodities and f/x were flying. Once-In-A-Lifetime-Tsunami? The mess the USA is in right now? Sure. The mortgage-backed securities market? Just another bubble like Mexico 1994, Russia 1998…there are a ton of them.
October 23rd, 2008 at 9:49 pm
Close. Most people have limits to their greed, perhaps because of a social conscience or whatever. But a great many will always push every limit and exploit every loophole to get a little more. Laws, like regulation, are designed to restrain the impulses of those unable to self-discipline themselves.
The trouble with Greenspan is his flawed ideology. It kept him blind to the housing bubble till 2006 - by his own admission. Yet it was pretty obvious to many a market analyst that home values were appreciating at exponential growth rates at least two years earlier than that 2006 peak.
Just as the infallibility of the Pope and Karl Rove before him has been disproved, now it’s quite clear that Sir Bubbles was just an ordinary mortal who happened to hold a lofty position during the boom time of an era change. He only admits to one mistake while I’ve seen plenty of errors. He talks a good game but he contributed to a series of major market failures and promoted extreme deregulatory moves that only made matters worse.
He doesn’t know what happened because he refuses to take responsibility. And he’s just this era’s Barnum and Bailey, still trying to fool the rubes. He knows. And he knows pleading ignorance is the only way to beat the rap.
October 24th, 2008 at 12:05 pm
[…] Loyal GOPers, bless their deluded souls, have a built-in excuse for losing this one. Somehow, “mysteriously,” the economy tanked. But this is an economy of their own making. I will never forget Bush’s second Treasury Secretary Snow, a Toledo native for Pete’s sake saying outsourcing was a good thing back in ‘04, and that new jobs were coming to Ohio. What bull! […]