Rus7355, June 25 at 2:59 pm #

Long live Capitalism. Long live freedom. Long live the most humane nation on earth, the United States of America.

I, too, thought that way about Greenspan for many, many years.  But try as I could I could NOT get my head around his crushing the Dot Com bubble in the late 90’s. 

We were prosperous and he deliberately created a recession.  DELIBERATELY. That’s not a guess, that’s not wishful thinking. It is simply the logical inference from his actions to “cool” the economy and market down—and give a little knife in Democratic Bill Clinton’s back.

Then, when President Tammany proposed his insane, absurd, irresponsible tax cut to destroy the surplus, I couldn’t f***ing BELIEVE that Greenspan endorsed it.  I still don’t, and Greenspan himself has said “Um, er, maybe the tax cuts weren’t so wise…”  Had AG said “This is unwise. The budget is sound, why mess it up?”  the series of events that led us to this mess today never would have happened, at least not until the Iraq black-hole of money wasting.

I fully understand what Greenspan was doing all those years he brilliantly led the Fed, so I understood when he started messing up, too.  Hubris easily can take over any man or woman with power.

Accusations of ignorance simply because you don’t like a POV tells me YOU don’t understand the underlying econonomics of his actions.

are we still waiting for greenspan to speak??? i would have thought we had had enough of those years…

Well, it looks almost surreal that I find myself agreeing on economics with an old opponent, Inherit The Wind. I concur with your comment ITW and I exactly feel what you feel about Greenspan and criminal Bush. Hard times seem to work magic in bringing people together!

Stranger things have happened!

I’m simple.  I keep hearing how the oil prices were bid up by speculators, how this part of the problem was caused by so and so, that the downturn is caused by this and that.  It’s all BS.

The collapse of our economy is solely due to George W. Bush going into the credit markets like a plague of locusts into a cornfield.  He turned the surplus into a deficit “Reagan proved deficits don’t matter” said Dick Cheney.  Oh, yeah? Wrong again Dick Vader!

Then with the insane Iraq invasion and no cushion (because the surplus was now a deficit) the borrowing became a 500 year plague of locusts.  The results were totally predictable.

And all the people they are blaming are nothing more than aggravating factors, not the cause.  The cause is creating 3 TRILLION dollars of debt in 7 years, mostly in the last 5. Any individual or business, even GM would have declared bankruptcy long ago.

Are we still expected to listen to Greenspan?  His fingerprints are all over our economic mess, a mess that is not predicated on events beyond our control…many of them were under his direct control.

And if he was using the real numbers, the ones that don’t get published anymore like the M3, he wouldn’t be able to hedge on whether it was a big or little recession.

Agreed, purplewolf and cyrena.  I warned people on other sites a long time ago that Michigan’s “one state recession” was no such thing, but rather that we were - once again - the canary in the coal mine.  And for those of us who live in the state’s extremities, many of the economic issues have been here for even longer.  (Gas prices in the UP have been closer to California than other parts of the state for a long time.)

But i’m not expecting politicians of either stripe to do anything proactive about it.  They’ll wait until the shit really hits the fan and then figure out who to blame.

And it looks as though it’s time for America to put on that golden strait-jacket of its own design.

I’ve never seen it this bad, this is no recession Mr. Greenspan.

The mood when you go out, the way people look at you. The empty shelves and shortages.  People are getting scared

Yet the leaders who got us into this mess seem to stand around with their hands in their pockets, like they don’t have a clue as to what to do.

Congress should immediately freeze the price of Gas, and exempt truckers from paying any tax, either at the pump or for road fees.

Congress should seriously consider nationalizing the oil industry. That’s excactly what they deserve.

Somethings got to give, and it won’t take much at this point.

Alan Greenspan is the man who should have known better.  In the late 90’s he decided to show Wall Street who REALLY controlled the economy. “New Economy”? “Dot Coms”? He’d bring THEM under control!  And gave the US a technical recession just to discredit Clinton on the eve of the election.

Then, when President SwiperFox wanted to give that BIG bolus of money that was the Budget Surplus to his buddies, Greenspan used his own “bully pulpit” to ringingly endorse it.

That sonuvabaitch! Greenspan is a BANKER! He KNEW what it meant to have the 900 lb gorilla go back in the financial markets, borrowing.  He knew what it meant to spend your “rainy day” emergency money for no reason.  Yet Greenspan endorsed Bush’s foolish criminal grab for the FOGs (Friends of George).  Then, when the whole thing backfired, Alan said “Maybe it (the tax cuts) was a bad idea.”  Yuh think so, Alan??????

I know what you mean Purplewolf, but it’s not only Michigan. It’s been the same way in other spots for a long time as well, though I understand you all have really been hit hard.

And, it only seems like the rest of the country is just starting to feel it, because so many places were sitting on a house of cards.

What has really wiped us out in California has been of course the high price of gas, (and it’s always been much higher here than other places). That hasn’t affected me personally, since I gave up having a car long ago, and really on walking/biking/busing. But most recently the wipe out has become food. Food was generally reasonably priced here, because we grow, breed or fish for most of what we eat. (or..we used to at least.)

But now, the prices are unreal, and I know that even as bad as they are here, things are far worse in other places, where the supplies are even more limited, even if one has the money.

But for you all in Michigan, there’s one good way to look at it..by now, you’re ‘adjusted’ to getting by on less, and making the most of limited resources. I got ‘adjusted’ as well, about 8 years ago. As our friend Tao Walker would say, it’s gonna be much, much more difficult for some of the ‘domesticated’ peoples of the USA.

This is no surprise for those of us living in Michigan. It’s been in a recession for far to long. The rest of the country is just starting to catch up with what we have lived with for decades.