Don’t blame me, Greenspan says

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The prose isn’t any easier to digest than what was in his famously tortuous speeches, but if you want to read former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan’s spirited defense of his 2002-2004 super-low-interest-rate policy, check out the piece he wrote on Sunday in the Financial Times of London.

Greenspan’s legion of critics say he kept short-term rates too low for too long, helping to inflate the housing bubble. But he writes that ‘the evidence that monetary policy added to the bubble is statistically very fragile.’

As for the argument that the Fed and other banking regulators should have stopped the sub-prime mortgage boom before it reached the level of wretched excess, Greenspan appears to just throw up his hands.

‘The problem is not the lack of regulation but unrealistic expectations about what regulators are able to prevent,’ he writes.

Anyone want 10 minutes for rebuttal?