By Robert Darryl Shoon: When younger, Alan Greenspan wondered if he could have prevented the Great Depression had he been Fed chairman during the 1920s. Fate, however, was to give Greenspan a far different future than he expected; instead of preventing a depression, he would cause one.
After the scare of the 1970s, central bankers, i.e. Greenspan et. al., focused on containing inflation and came to believe they had successfully done so, not realizing that monetary expansion had instead morphed into asset bubbles, e.g. stocks, property, and bonds, not general price inflation as in the past.
Deluded by his apparent success, as chairman of the Federal Reserve Greenspan provided Wall Street with ever-increasing amounts of credit while unleashing market forces that would someday bring down the markets themselves (not until his Fed tenure ended would most understand what Greenspan had set in motion).
Receiving an honorary knighthood from the Queen of England in 2002 for his apparent ability to create growth without inflation, Greenspan enjoyed the adulation of his increasingly wealthy followers who had not yet experienced the end-result of his policies, to wit the catastrophic collapse of global markets on an unprecedented scale......read on
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