Making the boom continue at home and abroad has been the prime focus of U.S. monetary policy for quite some time. But among the unintended consequences emerge the broadly based lowering of perceived risk levels in the financial markets and a global spread of careless investment activities.
One day in 1953, an employee of the United States Bureau of Engraving and Printing with a distinguished ten-year employment record and a wife and two young sons, decided to become a thief. And working at the Bureau for the government showed him how he could do it.
It would be the supreme irony if, in Greenspan's eager rush to bail out his constituents at the first whiff of every trouble from Y2k to WTC, all he and his myrmidons on the lower slopes of Olympus have accomplished is to topple the very banks they are there to protect.
Does the Fed play politics? As Gregory Bresiger recalls, it's been a part of the game for a very long time.
Contrary to popular belief, interest rates have nothing to do with money. The attempt to manipulate interest via the money supply can only cause distortions.
Martin Mayer is one of the few financial journalists to seriously question the claims of the Federal Reserve. Sadly, he does not go far enough.
Greenspan has lowered rates again, but he can't know if he has done the right thing. Under the far-superior gold standard, such questions never came up. Lawrence Reed explains.
A combination of factors has elevated the Federal Reserve and its chairman to mythical status amongst the corporate and media elite.
Even before the recent rate cuts, Greenspan had opened the monetary spigots, in a duplication of the policy error that led to the artificial boom. William Anderson explains.
He has fallen from grace for failing to inflate. But Greenspan is still wrongly assumed, by everyone but the Austrians, to have god-like powers over the economy. Hans Sennholz explains.
