I said it almost exactly one year ago: a better tag for Alan Greenspan would be the “Sorcerer’s Apprentice.” When your policies lead to as much havoc as his did, nobody but nobody should be calling you a maestro.
But the former Fed chairman soldiers on, putting out a paper that lays the blame on the “weak recovery” at the feet of an overreaching government, which sends Paul Krugman into orbit:
Greenspan writes in characteristic form: other people may have their models, but he’s the wise oracle who knows the deep mysteries of human behavior, who can discern patterns based on his ineffable knowledge of economic psychology and history.
Sorry, but he doesn’t get to do that any more. 2011 is not 2006. Greenspan is an ex-Maestro; his reputation is pushing up the daisies, it’s gone to meet its maker, it’s joined the choir invisible.
He’s no longer the Man Who Knows; he’s the man who presided over an economy careening to the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.
You’ve got to appreciate Krugman consciously parroting (pun intended) an old Monty Python bit, the famous dead-parrot sketch.
“This is an ex-parrot.”
(h/t Big Picture)
March 22, 2011
Greenspan’s proper epitath:
“he’s the man who presided over an economy careening to the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.”
Bush and Greenspan, quite a team. Obama and the US are still digging out of the worst depression since 1930. We still have many years to go, 20+ million unemployed.