Greenspan's Empty Talk

Greenspan’s Empty Talk

Tags: Capital and Interest Theory, Fiscal Theory, Money and Banking, The Fed, Financial Markets, Money and Banks, U.S. Economy

06/22/2026 Joseph T. Salerno

On the day Greenspan died, this 2001 essay by Joseph T. Salerno deserves a second life. It documented what the mainstream refused to see: that Greenspan replaced economic theory with intuition, replaced analysis with data-worship, and called his guesswork a science.

Original article: https://mises.org/mises-daily/greenspans-empty-talk

The Mises Institute is a non-profit organization that exists to promote teaching and research in the Austrian School of economics, individual freedom, honest history, and international peace, in the tradition of Ludwig von Mises and Murray N. Rothbard.

Non-political, non-partisan, and non-PC, we advocate a radical shift in the intellectual climate, away from statism and toward a private property order. We believe that our foundational ideas are of permanent value, and oppose all efforts at compromise, sellout, and amalgamation of these ideas with fashionable political, cultural, and social doctrines inimical to their spirit.