Greenspan's Bubbles: The Age of Ignorance at the Federal Reserve

by William Fleckenstein, Fred Sheehan

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No matter who you are-investor, trader, homeowner, 401(k) holder, or CEO-you are bound to feel the impact of Alan Greenspan's “Age of Ignorance” for years to come.

According to MSN Money columnist William A. Fleckenstein, Greenspan's nearly 19-year career as Federal Reserve Chairman is even worse than anyone imagined. Labeled “Mr. Bubble” by the New York Times, Greenspan was nothing less than a serial bubble blower with a long history of bad decision-making. His famous “Greenspan Put” fueled the perception of a Goldilocks economy-but, as this explosive exposé reveals, the bear has finally caught up with Goldilocks.

Using transcripts of Greenspan's FOMC meetings as well as testimony before Congress, this eye-opening book delivers a timeline of his most devastating mistakes and weaves together the connection between every economic calamity of the past 19 years:

The stock market crash of 1987
The Savings & Loan crisis
The collapse of Long Term Capital Management
The tech bubble of 2000
The feared Y2K disaster
The credit bubble and real estate crisis of 2007

Fleckenstein explains just how far-reaching Greenspan's mess has been flung, and presents damning evidence that contradicts the former Fed chief's public naiveté concerning shifts in the market and economy. He also points to a disturbing fact, that throughout his career, Greenspan not only made costly mistakes, but made the same ones-over and over again. And not only was he never able to recognize or admit to those mistakes, he constantly rewrote his own history to justify them.

Greenspan's Bubbles offers a lock-stock-and-barrel portrait of a flawed but fascinating man whose words and actions have led a whole generation astray, and whose legacy will continue to challenge us in the years ahead.

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All Customer Reviews
Average Customer Review: 4 out of 5 stars

0 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

2 out of 5 stars

Fist Fight?, 2008-07-20
The book appears to contain a few things of substance, but you have to look so hard to get past the vitriole it's almost not worth the effort. I'm not a big Greenspan fan and certainly not his apologist, but Fleckenstein appears to be pissed beyond reason. I get the impression Fleckenstein thought he should have been appointed Fed Chair and hasn't gotten over it yet. If Greenspan was as imbecilic as Fleckenstein tries to paint him, he wouldn't be able to find his way to the men's room without a GPS. Come on Fleck, get over it. You've got something to say. Could you possibly say it without all the name calling and innuendo. Why not take Greenspan out on the playground and you two can duke it out? Take a deep breath. Count to ten. Have a glass of wine.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4 out of 5 stars

If you're not outraged, you're not paying attention, 2008-07-17
It's taking me a long time to read this because I become so angry that I have to put the boook down. This well-documented collection of mistakes at the highest financial levels, and the following "spin", demonstrates that the bigger the job, the more likelihood of error, and the greatest likelihood is that the person in charge maintains arrogant ignorance and shovels it out to the unsuspecting public.

0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:

4 out of 5 stars

The Mystery of Alan Greenspan, 2008-07-16
In fall 1999, six months before tech stocks went into free-fall, the bestselling book "The Internet Bubble" was published. In it, the authors described how the financial foodchain of entrepreneur, venture capitalist, investment banker, and public stock speculator created the tech bubble. The authors also did the math to show how grossly over-valued Internet companies were.

For most of this rampant speculation, Alan Greenspan was enabling the process by expanding the money supply and cutting interest rates. The authors of "Greenspan's Bubbles" document, in Greenspan's own words, why they think the Chairman was doing this. Greenspan's utterances--especially those behind the closed doors of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) that the authors were able to access up until 2001--prove, the authors say, that it was because Greenspan drank the "new economy" Kool-Aid and thus didn't think there was a bubble.

Other critics feel that Greenspan's statements, both private and public, were merely a cover to try to maintain the legitimacy of the Fed as long as possible....

http://www.itulip.com/forums/showthread.php?p=2405#poststop

Readers will have to decide which theory they find most feasible.

0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:

5 out of 5 stars

You Can't Dispute the Facts Provided in the Book, 2008-07-06
Shocking!! Great facts supporting the book. Truly shocking to see how irresponsible Greenspan acted in cuting rates when there was no evidence to support these cuts. From this book you can understand how Greenspan's ego created long term troubles for the US economy which could have resulted in shorter recessions. He even encourages fellow Americans to seek adjustable rate mortages (p. 155). Unbeleivable!!!

0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:

4 out of 5 stars

Greenspan: Idiot or economic charlatan?, 2008-06-28
This book is hardly cozy, bedtime reading, but its short length (194 pgs.)
makes it fast reading. Author Fleckenstein takes the former Fed Chairman's public pronouncements over the course of the 1980s into the 2000s, and contrasts them with the Chairman's statements during Fed deliberations from the same period, the transcrips of which have recently
been releassed. In my opinion the result shows that Greenspan's reckless policies are directly responsible for the recently-popped lending and housing bubbles that we'll all end up paying for via monetary inflation.

Reading this book (among others) makes me want to move to Switzerland where I can be out of reach of results of inflationary Congressional action about to take place to bail out builders, borrowers and bankers.

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