Greenspan defends subprime role to Swedish bankers

[flashl]

STOCKHOLM (Reuters) - Ex-Federal Reserve chief Alan Greenspan told a Stockholm audience on Friday he did not believe he had caused the U.S. subprime crisis and had warned of the risk in 2004, a person attending the event said.

The participant in the event held by Sweden's Handelsbanken (SHBa.ST: Quote, Profile, Research), which was closed to media, said Greenspan was reluctant to discuss last month's pair of aggressive interest-rate cuts by the Fed.

"He said he didn't want to talk about the Fed's policy today," the participant said.

"He said it is in the nature of the Fed to be more aggressive in cutting rates in a cyclical slowdown than in raising them when the economy is good."

The attendee said Greenspan deflected suggestions that the Fed, which cut rates to a four-decade low of 1 percent after the bursting of the dotcom bubble and the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States, helped spark the crisis in the U.S. subprime market.

Reuters

[nightrider767]

1. He's partly right..

So he cut rates to zero, but I'll never forget at same time he said this:

"Rate cuts aren't enough to bring this economy around. We need to develop some new technology's to stimulate this economy".

And he was right. We should have dumped funding into research on alternate energy sources.

[Warpy]

2. That's certainly a can't lose proposition

as well as dumping funds into repairing our crumbling infrastructure, from roads to the electric grid to schools to health care.

The problem is that unless this country goes after the ultra rich, we won't have the money to do any of it. It can't borrow and spend like FDR did. Stupid slammed that door shut and nailed it tight.

[Captain Angry]

3. There was a story the other day about the broadband infrastructure.

It's estimated that we'll need to spend around $100M to get our broadband up to the standards overseas.

What a mess.

[flashl]

5. SInce the meltdown of the dot.com, we learn that we had a fiber surplus.

The lastest estimates of broadband width shortage is suspect. A new bubble economy maybe?

[Captain Angry]

6. There is a fiber surplus in some parts of the country.

A lot of dark fiber is out there.

But the country wide networks don't exist. North Dakota and New Mexico don't exactly have a whole lot of high speed connection.

As movies move to online transmission, schools move to online education, businesses move to global telecommunication, bandwidth will be a limit to the US's growth when compared with other countries.

[flashl]

7. We don't have to wait for the RBOCs to create a business model to rape us

Not your father's ISP

Some ISPs simply discourage end users from offering WiFi connections to neighbors; most explicitly rule it out in their terms of service. But a small Canadian ISP called Wireless Nomad actually requires it.

Nomad does things a little differently. The company is subscriber-owned, volunteer-run, and open-source friendly. It offers a neutral Internet connection with no bandwidth caps or throttling, and it makes a point of creating wireless access points at the end of each DSL connection that can be used, for free, by the public. Bell Canada this is not.

ARS Technica

[edhopper]

4. He also

endorsed the disastrous Bush Tax Cuts rather than say the surplus should be used for investment, And he promoted the use of ARMs and exotic loans for home mortgages.
He made this mess and can't escape the blame by covering his ass with inane comments like this.