The Fed

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.

Tax cuts are great, but there is a missing element in Bush's budget: any attempt to cut outlays. New spending must be paid for somehow, someday, writes Frank Shostak.

For a decade, calls for easy money and cheap credit were subdued. But now that hard times are upon us again, guess what? Martin Masse explains.

Pundits often blame tight money for economic downturns. But what about the loose money policies that created the unsustainable boom in the first place? John Cochran explains.

He has succeeded in misleading almost everyone into accepting a bizarre and idiosyncratic view of the business cycle, writes Joseph Salerno.

What causes an economic downturn? The business press keeps getting it painfully wrong, writes Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.

Woodward reports that Greenspan himself was willing, on occasion, to do things that weren't strictly legal.

Earlier last year (February 17) in testimony before the House Banking Committee, Alan Greenspan argued that increases in productivity tend to create greater increases in aggregate demand than in potential aggregate supply. His reasoning was that productivity increases stimulate optimistic corporate earnings forecasts, which stimulate stock price increases, which lead consumers to assume increased personal wealth, which increases consumption (and thus aggregate) expenditure.