Greenspan’s New Fiscal Worries

John Cassidy rightly eviscerates

Alan Greenspan in the October issue of Portfolio. Cassidy concentrates on

Greenspan’s role in inflating the credit bubble which is currently bursting:

"For a Fed chairman to have one speculative bubble inflate during his tenure

is an indictment; to have two of them qualifies him as a serial bubble blower,"

he writes.

But the bit which made me do a double-take is where Cassidy reports that Greenspan

worries at some length in his new book about "the grave fiscal challenges

facing the country".

Now Greenspan has fiscal worries? This is the man who testified to

Congress at the beginning of the first Bush administration, saying that sweeping

tax cuts were a jolly good idea because otherwise the government would run a

fiscal surplus for so long that it would pay down the entire national debt and

then what would it do with the money?

There were many low point in Greenspan’s tenure, but that was surely the lowest.

I wonder if Greenspan even mentions it in his book.

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