Alan Greenspan has died

Responsibility is not something that the current market players want to see, whether it be through the gold standard, reasonable interest rates, or any other mechanism. They'll argue that the next big thing is simply too expensive for that sort of constraint.

Revisionist history will tell it differently, but I remember that from the mid 1990s until about 2000 when the economy was booming yet prices weren't rising, Greenspan publicly indicated that he wasn't sure exactly why that was. Or at least that the information economy had different performance characteristics than the industrial economy, since production wasn't limited by supply but by worker productivity multipliers.

Why did the cost of living decrease in the 90s but not today? What was different then vs now? Well, after the Dot Bomb and 9/11, the US hasn't followed macroeconomic principles (the main principle being to raise interest rates during increased production to prevent inflation), examine the flip after 2000:

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/richard-clarida-085777125_wea...

Breadcrumbs:

https://financialpost.com/news/alan-greenspan-dies-at-100 (alternative article)

https://www.federalreserve.gov/boarddocs/speeches/1999/19990... (example speech)

https://www.dallasfed.org/~/media/documents/research/swe/200... (analysis pdf)

Note that policy had a greater effect on US economic decline than who the Fed chair was. Specifically, the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA) known as the Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999 (which reversed the Glass–Steagall Act of 1933 and removed barriers in the market among banking companies, securities companies, and insurance companies) allowed investors to gamble with our savings again like before the Great Depression:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gramm-Leach-Bliley_Act

The Housing Bubble popped less than a decade later in 2008.

The Telecommunications Act of 1996 had deregulated the information economy, cementing the duopolies we see today, although the fallout from that arguably wasn't felt until after the arrival of fast mobile internet that coincided with the 2008 financial crisis, which contributed to the high communications prices we pay today vs the rest of the world (imposing a kind of privatized tax on the information economy):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecommunications_Act_of_1996

What I saw then was the last hurrah of US colonialism, which patterned itself off of England but used proxy wars instead of direct colonization. Loosely, keeping Asia down supported western antisocialist goals while simultaneously bolstering capitalist economies. In other words, buying shoes for $5 and selling them for $100 (times everything) allowed the US to transition from blue collar to white collar work.

That resulted in the US closing 100,000 factories under the GW Bush administration of the 2000s. And also outsourcing to China and India, the reduction of pure R&D to almost nothing, massive investment in McMansions and SUVs instead of something like renewable energy, and of course diverting perhaps $3 trillion or more to forever wars in the Middle East to prop up the declining industrial economy which depends on fossil fuels.

That's all changing now as China's buying power is passing that of the US:

https://www.capitaleconomics.com/blog/china-versus-us-size-s...

They don't want to make our stuff for pennies on the dollar anymore, and the US can't carry its own weight without massive reeducation and retooling.

But since the US wasted $40 trillion on its national debt instead of investing in the 21st century economy we thought we are going to get in the 90s, we now see prices increasing in parity with wages. In other words, nearly all excess labor productivity goes towards paying the debt ran up by the previous generation. Thomas Jefferson warned against this:

https://www.meteor.iastate.edu/gccourse/develop/jefferson.ht...

The young are paying the elderly's retirement while being told to eat less avocado toast.

The reason I'm writing this is that the powers that be will try to tell you that we need to cut government spending and taxes to outrun our economic decline. But if you understand everything I just wrote, then you'll see that the damage of 40 years of trickle-down economics and austerity has already been done.

The way out of this is self-evidently to try new approaches favored by the youth who are doing the work but not seeing the benefits like previous generations did. We're living in a second Gilded Age dominated by wage slavery and high wealth inequality:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilded_Age

The way we overcame that was to do the opposite of everything you see the establishment promoting today:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_Era

The low-hanging fruit is getting money out of politics (reversing the Citizens United decision), closing the revolving door between the government and lobbyists, antitrust enforcement, and other popular goals.

But real progress looks like FDR-style New Deal taxation on the ultra-wealthy to pay down the public debt, forgiveness of private debts incurred by artificially inflated costs (jubilee) and public funding of the commons (education, healthcare, the energy and communications grids, anything that results in natural monopolies).

Greenspan wouldn't have liked what I just wrote at the end there. But he would have supported the ending of intergenerational debt IMHO. That's why I think it makes a good target for today's youth, when they need a litmus test for deciding whether voting for a proposed policy is in their best interest.

Greenspan actively advocated for more use of ARM mortgages for personal home buying, while in a position to have the best access to data and analysis on the growing risk of those mortgages. Whereas mere common sense and a knowledge of economic history would argue against widespread use of ARMs for individual home purchases. When the fed chair says “we need more ARMs” to a market using ARMs to prop up a growing bubble, that is as much or more responsibility as any other single person.

From your linked article.

” The Wall Street Crash of October 1929 precipitated a U.S. recession, but it was the gold standard that converted this into a worldwide depression. With currencies locked to gold, there was little scope to ease monetary conditions. When the U.S. economy slumped, its import demand plummeted and it exported deflation to the rest of the world. Gold-standard countries could not respond by cutting interest rates or letting their currencies depreciate to stimulate exports – their priority was to defend the peg. As a result, economic downturns spread rapidly.”

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