I've read you intermittently over the years - particuarly some of your more fevered speculations on how the Fed was manipulating the stock market and how the BLS was cooking the CPI (an assertion based on a serious misunderstanding of the seasonal adjustment process, which you apparently never corrected). None of it seemed very well sourced or thought through, but, hey, you write for Rupert Murdoch, and he deals mainly in entertainment.
Now you're urging Greenspan to ride in on his white horse bearing huge baskets of S&P buy tickets. Why? After all these years of hearing about the character-despoiling nature of government welfare programs, about the beautiful symmetries of risk and reward in private markets, you're asking the government to pump some more gas into one of the most bubbleacious stock markets in human history. Have our economic, political, and ideological structures become so dependent on 20% annual S&P returns and 80% annual NASDAQ returns that a bear market is unthinkable? Should we amend the Constitution to charge the Fed with guaranteeing an annual minimum of 10% on the S&P? That would be good news for the richest 1% of the population that owns 48% of all stock, or the 10% that owns 88%. For the rest of us, well, may we have some of your crumbs, please?
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Doug Henwood Left Business Observer Village Station - PO Box 953 New York NY 10014-0704 USA +1-212-741-9852 voice +1-212-807-9152 fax email: <mailto:dhenwood at panix.com> web: <http://www.panix.com/~dhenwood/LBO_home.html>