Pay particular attention to the man to the right of Chimpy: Alan Greenspan. More than anyone else, this current financial catastrophe, is directly due to Greenspan's complete unwillingness to regulate the financial industry.
This is not news. I blogged about this six months ago. Hell, eight months ago, and twice.
Now Michael Hirsh is weighing in and his judgment is the same: It was Greenspan's job to regulate the mortgage and banking industries. He failed.
Greenspan was not just negligent, he was criminally negligent. It would almost be tempting to conclude that Greenspan was an active saboteur of the American economy, for all the damage that his ideological reliance on the morally bankrupt philosophies of Ayn Rand have brought us. Greenspan and the other true believers of Randism thought that honor would trump avarice. He was so wrong, but he is not the one who is bearing the burden of his abject foolishness.
It was Greenspan's job to oversee the mortgage market and to regulate it. He not only was asleep at the switch, he turned his back on the approaching trains. There were warning signs as far back as eight years ago that the mortgage market was heading for a cliff and when the Federal Reserve was made aware of that, they did not do a fucking thing. That was Greenspan's doing. He made sure that no impediments, no regulation, no oversight was placed on the mortgage industry.
The other acolytes of deregulation, including Phil Gramm, John McCain, George W. Bush and the rest of that pack of drooling syphalitic hyenas all share some of the blame, true. But it was Alan Greenspan's job to mind the shop, to watch the store, to police the market. And in that regard, Greenspan had all of the skills and ability of his hero in law enforcement:
No comments:
Post a Comment