[lbo-talk] Re: Greenie's Latest Spin

Brad Mayer Bradley.Mayer at Sun.COM
Tue Mar 16 10:54:21 PST 2004


LOL, Hoping that would be caught...now I'll just stand aside and let you two duke it out..

I'll only say that Dougs' list shows that Easy Al, careening from crisis to (perhaps greater) crisis, has been reduced to playing a supporting role as juggler and clown.

For example , if it's plausible logic to say that household debt burdens bave been eased via the refi blitz, then it is just as possible by the same logic to say that they will be 'reburdened' should rates go up. So they can never go up, until US consumers actually pay down the debt ( tantamount to saying that levels are too high), which equals a reduction in consumption (demand), which can't happen unless another country ramps up their consumption to compensate. And we know that such a rebalancing won't be so smooth in practice: it would require breaking the effective peg that most countries have with the USD. And, despite the Euro hoopla, the USD had not yet begun to truly devalue against most currencies - not yet at all enough to correct for the huge volume of free money handed out by the Fed & US Treasury.

Unless Greenie's Big New Idea is to abolish capitalism.

But Perpetual War _is_ one way out.

Brad Mayer wrote: (Actually I did not - NYT said it)


>But J. Bradford DeLong, a longtime Fed watcher at the University of
>California at Berkeley, cautioned that Mr. Greenspan had been right at
>times when many others were wrong.
>
>"I think he's wrong, but he's got a better track record than I have,"
>Mr. DeLong said.

(Sorry about the previous, got away empty.)

Hmmm,

* 1987 dollar crisis and stock market crash. * Late 80s climax of S&L disaster and leveraging mania. * Three years of stagnation and jobless recovery in early 1990s. * Stock market bubble which he repeatedly pronounced not to be a bubble. * Bubbles followed by financial crises and severe recessions in Mexico (1994-95), Russia, and Southeast Asia (1997-98). * The Long Term Capital Management bailout. * The bursting of the 1990s bubble, followed by three years of a flat-to-declining job market. * The home equity withdrawal bubble, which he declares not to be a bubble. * Overt partisan corruption of the office of Fed chair, with his contrasting stance on Democratic and Republican deficits.

Have you got a worse record hidden in a closet somehwere?

Doug



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