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Alan Greenspan has died

washingtonpost.com

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Re: Alan Greenspan has died

#111

Post by enragedcacti »

anthonypasq wrote: post #91
enragedcacti wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> - stopping fraud / - addressing wasteful and ineffective programs Good to know that this will be an evergreen argument despite an extremely well-supported project to do just that taking place in the last two years with nothing to show for itself other than hundreds of thousands of deaths.

> despite an extremely well-supported project to do just that a weird extremely small executive branch task force with pretty much zero power is not what i would call a well supported project in the context of the trying to reduce spending in the american government. Congress controls the purse, doge had nothing to do with congress.

Tell it to the hundreds of thousands of dead people that doge had zero power. It didn't seem to matter that their aid was congressionally allocated, so sorry if I'm skeptical that doge was ineffective because of an abundance of restraint and respect for separation of powers.

Re: Alan Greenspan has died

#112

Post by shagie »

bhouston wrote: post #11
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.

I think that this was relatively not known as a major risk far in advance otherwise more traders would have gotten rich. Michael Burry only started to short the market in late 2005, four months before Greenspan's term ended. It is hard to ask Greenspan to have super natural powers of foresight beyond just about everyone else.

https://youtu.be/mqicZN7wHtU is the final bit from the Big Short where Mark Baum is to speak before the "legendary, former chairman of the Fed Alan Greenspan" at a financial conference in 2008.

Re: Alan Greenspan has died

#113

Post by anothermathbozo »

flumes_whims_ wrote: post #106
jandrese wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

He killed Brooksley Born’s proposed derivatives regulations in the late 90’s.

Re: Alan Greenspan has died

#114

Post by [deleted] »

rawgabbit wrote: post #100
greenavocado wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Great Depression was caused by France panic hoarding gold https://www.nber.org/papers/w16350 Semi-ironically France was the reason the US fell off the dollar standard after it panic hoarded gold AGAIN when the French government made one last, massive purchase of gold from the US using US dollars, paying $35/oz. A French warship arrived in New York in early August 1971 to load the gold and bring it back to France.…

Sorry no. France was a wreck of itself after WWI having lost an entire generation of its young men. Germany was even worse off. The US was the economic engine of the world after WWI. Despite the fact the US regulatory institutions was in its infancy. The FED at that time had no teeth. It was only after FDR became president and the continuous bank runs that the FDIC and Glass Steagall (which has been repealed) and mod…

[deleted]

Re: Alan Greenspan has died

#115

Post by roughly »

curiousllama wrote: post #88
BigTTYGothGF wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Yea, that's his point. The gold standard neither prevents nor encourages inequality, except inasmuch as it limits policy flexibility (which, similarly, could be used to promote or limit inequality).

Policy flexibility is the only one of those that’s in theory responsive to democratic governance. Your opinion of whether that’s a good thing or not depends somewhat on which side of the inequality you’re on, I think.

Re: Alan Greenspan has died

#116

Post by roughly »

bhouston wrote: post #28
brightball wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

39 trillion in debt with no Congressional stomach for... - spending cuts - stopping fraud - figuring out how the net worth of people in Congress increases from hundreds of thousands of dollars to 10s or 100s of millions of dollars - addressing wasteful and ineffective programs Given those issues, the only solution will be inflation. The circling the drain moment will hit with the associated welfare programs get a dir…

Also please add as an option: raise taxes on the wealthy individuals and corporations back. https://inequality.org/article/11-charts-tax-wealthy-corpora... This is really ambiguous: "- stopping fraud" And can mean many things. On the right, it often means Somali daycares, on the left it means the underfunding of the IRS so that it doesn't do audits of rich people. I find this to be mostly a distraction: "- figuring o…

“Raising taxes” is a misnomer - “restoring taxes to the level they were when we were deciding how to allocate tax revenue” is more accurate. There’s plenty of other causes of the deficit, but “Congress deciding not to take money from wealthy people and corporations to fund the services they’d promised to the rest of us” is the core. We don’t have a budget deficit, we have a tax revenue deficit.

Re: Alan Greenspan has died

#117

Post by bko »

throw0101d wrote: post #56
bko wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have come around to gold. Money shouldn't be dual purposes, we should apply single responsibility principal. Money should refer to some stable (albeit slightly growing by nature) account of measure. Prices should get cheaper. That's a progress dividend. We get better at growing food every year, why shouldn't food get cheaper? Imagine a world in which prices regularly go down. You're a passive beneficiary of technol…

> Prices should get cheaper. Does that include the price of labour? Are you okay with your salary going down? Because the historical record shows that's what happens during deflationary periods: producers of good/services see the price that they can sell things for goes down, and so they insist on their suppliers and inputs—including labour input—reduce their prices as well.

Why would it go down? The person is becoming more productive? Do employees at Apple salaries go down because the iPhone they're working on is worth less every year?

Again, tie it to things that decrease in price over time.

Re: Alan Greenspan has died

#118

Post by roughly »

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 banks were not, the bankers were.

Re: Alan Greenspan has died

#119

Post by bko »

margalabargala wrote: post #65
bko wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have come around to gold. Money shouldn't be dual purposes, we should apply single responsibility principal. Money should refer to some stable (albeit slightly growing by nature) account of measure. Prices should get cheaper. That's a progress dividend. We get better at growing food every year, why shouldn't food get cheaper? Imagine a world in which prices regularly go down. You're a passive beneficiary of technol…

> Imagine a world in which prices regularly go down That world results in a lot of people individually deciding "why buy now, when I can buy for less later" and sitting on their money. That in aggregate makes the economy much worse. You're up against human nature here. Money may be an arbitrary numerical denomination of value, but people's behavior around it and how that affects the economy at large need to be accoun…

Keep reading the comment.

Why do people buy iPhones today knowing that they can get a significant discount in 6-12m for that same iPhone

Re: Alan Greenspan has died

#120

Post by brightball »

enragedcacti wrote: post #111
anthonypasq wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> despite an extremely well-supported project to do just that a weird extremely small executive branch task force with pretty much zero power is not what i would call a well supported project in the context of the trying to reduce spending in the american government. Congress controls the purse, doge had nothing to do with congress.

Tell it to the hundreds of thousands of dead people that doge had zero power. It didn't seem to matter that their aid was congressionally allocated, so sorry if I'm skeptical that doge was ineffective because of an abundance of restraint and respect for separation of powers.

> hundreds of thousands of dead people

No reports have substantiated this talking point to my knowledge.

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