The Media Can't Stop Sucking Up to Alan Greenspan

[DonViejo]

Instead of treating him like a wise man, make him pay J.P. Morgan's fine

BY DAVID DAYEN

It’s impossible to change the channel this week without coming upon the grinning face of Alan Greenspan. The former Federal Reserve chairman’s new book, The Map and the Territory, releases this week, and he’s spending it on a grand tour through media green rooms across the country, from CBSto NPR to the BBC. Even Jon Stewart treated him with kid gloves. By Friday he’ll have a Food Network show.

So far, he’s gone virtually unchallenged. He has said the 2008 financial crisis “was the first time ever that markets were broken and could not fix themselves” (ever hear of the Depression?), and that he “could have caught a number of different crises” during his tenure at the Fed (which begs the question of why he didn’t). Journalists have asked such penetrating questions as, "You were knighted. Does that come with a title or anything?" Even the tough-minded Binyamin Applebaum called Greenspan "one of the nation’s most astute economic observers." Overall, the media has presented Greenspan's book as part of a soul-searching quest for why he missed the greatest economic collapse in decades—a frame that is needlessly obsequious and suggests he was a bystander to the disaster, not a central actor.

Needless to say, anyone who’s paid attention to the economy the past few years knows how ridiculous it is to fete Greenspan, the main architect of the policies that led to the Great Recession. If we lived in a just world, we would put him on trial, not on television. And his penalty should be to scrounge up the funds to pay JPMorgan Chase’s $13 billion fine with the Justice Department.

After all, that fine penalizes JPMorgan Chase for duping investors into purchasing mortgage-backed securities it knew were stuffed with garbage loans. And nobody in America duped more people—investors, homeowners, you name it—into buying bad loans than Alan Greenspan. While chairing the Fed, Greenspan was in a perfect position to inform Americans about the unsustainability of the housing bubble and the overall threats to the financial system. But his allergy to regulation and unshakeable belief in the virtues of the free market led him to ignore the bubble and its risks, infusing investors and consumers with confidence that the run-up in home prices was perfectly normal. If misleading the public about the safety and soundness of the housing market is a crime, Greenspan is guilty. And he deserves some manner of punishment for that, not a week full of deference and respect.

full article:
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/115285/media-cant-stop-sucking-alan-greenspan

[jakeXT]

1. Greenspan’s ‘Map’ Is Clueless Trip Through Bubble Land

If Alan Greenspan were Santa Claus, what’s the last thing you’d want for Christmas?

Given his track record, a guide to economic forecasting would have to be the worst present he could bring.

Yet that’s exactly what the former Federal Reserve Board chief delivers in his clueless new book, “The Map and the Territory.” A guide to economic forecasting by Greenspan is about as credible as art history by Mr. Magoo.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-10-17/greenspan-s-map-is-clueless-trip-through-bubble-land.html


At least not everyone in the media is buying his theories.