> But I would rather have Alan Greenspan--who is very, very capable
> indeed--running the Fed than any of a bunch of European central
> bankers I can think of who are not very capable and who still have
> Ayn Rand's values...
Capable of what? Feather-bedding ten years of mongo trade and current account deficits? Allowing the Bubble to go completely nuts, doing nothing to slow margin punting, and then finally detonating the current financial meltdown? For all its neoliberal rhetoric, the ECB did the EU's collective bidding by ending Euromonetarism, slashing real short rates to subzero levels, and avoiding wild speculative excess. The US central bank is about as dysfunctionally incompetent as all the other branches of our monarchy (though admittedly not quite as clueless as the Bank of "Bad Debts? What Bad Debts?" Japan in the early 1990s).
-- Dennis