Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Alan Greenspan has died

washingtonpost.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 274 posts

Re: Alan Greenspan has died

#101

Post by jimbokun »

BigTTYGothGF wrote: post #82
throw0101d wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> He wrote about how the gold standard created responsible spending and more equality in the world: The Gilded Age, which had quite high levels of inequality, occurred when the gold standard was active: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilded_Age It should also be noted that the gold standard did not bring any kind of price stability: * https://archive.is/https://www.theatlantic.com/business/arch... Further, sticking…

> The Gilded Age, which had quite high levels of inequality, occurred when the gold standard was active I've got some news for you about modern levels of inequality.

Don’t those two data points suggest inequality is orthogonal to the gold standard?

Re: Alan Greenspan has died

#102

Post by jimbokun »

b40d-48b2-979e wrote: post #6
bhouston wrote: post #5

I'm not a gold bug but Alan was a proponent of the gold standard. He wrote about how the gold standard created responsible spending and more equality in the world: https://ritholtz.com/2008/11/gold-and-economic-freedom-by-al... The world we are in now, especially in the US, is one where there is near unlimited government credit but it is, according to many, papering over deep structural problems. At some point, these…

He also oversaw the economy for twenty years before one of the worst recessions in the world. He helped set the stage for multiple disasters with his policies, so I'd take his opinions with a grain of salt.

By the same standard shouldn’t he also get credit for those 20 years of prosperity?

Re: Alan Greenspan has died

#103

Post by kakacik »

tsimionescu wrote: post #70
conductr wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s no need to make it difficult. All you have to do is publish sensible guardrails and force people to apply for assistance and it would shrink the public cost substantially. I have homeowners insurance, but if my home burns down today I won’t have any reasonable assistance deposited this week. There’s a claim process and I need to have an emergency fund to get my immediate needs met. Everyone should care. The n…

> All you have to do is publish sensible guardrails and force people to apply for assistance and it would shrink the public cost substantially. On the contrary, all public experience shows the opposite. The administrative costs of actually checking if only the right people are receiving a benefit very quickly start out weighing the cost of just paying everyone - especially if you don't want to make the process very o…

With llms this should be trivial. Government agency has access to tax fillings of individuals, because... why it shouldn't. They see income, they see family situation, age of kids etc, its couple of if-this-then-that and that's it. That can cover 80-90% of the cases precisely enough to make difference.

Don't let perfect be the enemy of good, nobody expects perfect checks but at least some sanity is much better than nothing. Also, it makes it much harder to shoot down by opponents rather than blanket money hose.

Re: Alan Greenspan has died

#104

Post by rawgabbit »

Noaidi wrote: post #97
rawgabbit wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 cutti…

It didn’t start with gold standard. It started with the issuance of greenbacks during the Civil War. If they never issued greenbacks during the Civil War, there would not have been an issue with going back on the gold standard.

Sorry. This is quixotic revisionism. What do you think happens during a war? Both the Union and the Confederacy were printing paper money like there is no tomorrow. In the case of the Confederacy, it was literally true.

Re: Alan Greenspan has died

#106

Post by flumes_whims_ »

jandrese wrote: post #27
fouc wrote: post #7

Mostly I just know Alan Greenspan for being a disciple of Ayn Rand back in the 1950s/60s. Though the Objectivists didn't like his work at the federal reserve. In 2008 he admits to being shocked that banks weren't rationally selfish.

The libertarian community really thought they had their fox in the hen house when he was put in charge of regulation, and he did a fair bit of deregulation, but not nearly to the extent that they wanted. In the end it was enough to trigger a major financial crisis, but not enough to completely collapse the world economy and return to the feudalism they wanted.

What regulations did he as federal reserve chair rollback and which of them caused the 2008 crash?

Re: Alan Greenspan has died

#107

Post by 59percentmore »

dragonwriter wrote: post #86
b40d-48b2-979e wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And when production for a system I built burns down the month after I leave my job, the next guy they hire was actually the culprit! Greenspan was seen as responsible for the dot-com bust as well which was solidly in the center of his tenure.

The dot-com bust produced an EXTREMELY mild recession (so mild that it was often misattributed to 9/11, which occurred when it was almost over. OTOH, there was a lot of pain iny the subsequent expansion leading up to the 2008 , but that was all the fault of fiscal (eepecially tax) policy of the Bush Administration and thei Congressional allies, not Fed monetary policy. While Greenspan clearly ideologically supported…

It was "mild" because they rolled the would-be losses into high-risk vehicles and strategies that eventually created the GFC, which included Fed policy to juice asset markets. The Dotcom bubble was the rolling over of the Reagan/Papa Bush-era savings and loan crisis (Greenspan was involved in that, too), and (tinfoil hats on now) a massive bond market liquidity crisis preceded the COVID pandemic flash crash and emergency liquidity injections/stimulus/PPP by a scant few months (and was quietly swept under the rug).

We deserve what we get if we don't act on the obvious pattern, at this point. We've spent half a century throwing the public under the bus just so that a few oligarchs don't have to pay out for their bad bets, and Greenspan was absolutely their man for a significant portion of that campaign in the class wars.

Re: Alan Greenspan has died

#108

Post by [deleted] »

chollida1 wrote: post #14
b40d-48b2-979e wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He also oversaw the economy for twenty years before one of the worst recessions in the world. He helped set the stage for multiple disasters with his policies, so I'd take his opinions with a grain of salt.

Really? I don't think anyone really holds him responsible for the dotnet crash of 2000 as that was a market issue and irrational exuberance issue and not a monetary one. And 2008 was similar. The Fed doesn't control or have any responsibility for lower lender standards or ARM mortgages. Congress was responsible for the GSE's that bought any mortgages and wrote insurance on those mortgages, so you can't blame the FED…

[deleted]

Re: Alan Greenspan has died

#109

Post by pjs_ »

Highly recommend the extremely good multipart documentary All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace by Adam Curtis for a fun and wide ranging if slightly silly look at the nexus of Greenspan, Ayn Rand, Silicon Valley, computer technology etc
Post reply on HN