Posts Tagged ‘Alan Greenspan’
Notebook, 16 July 2011: Time to put a stake through Friedman and perform a Greenspan exorcism
Crossposted to Antemedius.
A nice summation of the NotW scandal, as it has unfolded thus far, is here, courtest of Robert Zeliger over at FP’s Passport: A Sophie’s Choice For Murdoch:
As far as announcements go, Rebekah Brooks’s resignation today shocked just about no one. The chief executive of News International and a former editor of the disgraced and defunct News of the World had some initial support from Papa Rupert after the scandal first blew up, but as it snowballed this week — crushing everything in its path — her hara-kiri seemed impossible to avoid.
But will she be the last to fall on the sword? The knives are still out for Murdoch and his business empire. And focus has shifted to two important people in Rupert’s inner sanctum. He might find the need to sacrifice one of them. But who will it be: the son and heir apparent, or one of his closest confidantes who has been with him for 50 years?
Well, we already know the answer to that question. Even though son James Murdoch’s hands are far from clean, Les Hinton got the ax yesterday. In the Murdoch family, blood is thicker than water.
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Notebook, 7 November 2010: My view of markets
At some point in the near future, a “good job” may be defined as whether or not someone asks: “How do you want that cooked?”
“But how do we know when irrational exuberance has unduly escalated asset values, which then become subject to unexpected and prolonged contractions as they have in Japan over the past decade?”
Alan Greenspan, 5 December, 1996, Francis Boyer Lecture at The American Enterprise Institute. Accessed 6 November 2010.
There is certainly enough well documented history by now to reach some substantial conclusions about the worth and efficiency of the free market system. When Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan gave the speech at a black-tie event within the friendly confines of the American Enterprise Institute, the Nikkei index dropped 3.2%, the Hang Seng fell by 2.9%, the Dax dropped 4%, and when trade resumed the next morning, the Dow shed 2.3%[1]. The one man charged and believed to have the best overview of the actual state of the economy had just told the world that stocks weren’t worth the prices they were being traded at, and traders heeded those words for less than 48 hours.
