Books I Need To Read: Greenspan's Bubbles

I read an interest review of Greenspan's Bubbles by William A. Fleckenstein:

... He sets out to deflate Alan Greenspan's reputation by parsing Greenspan's own comments during his tenure as chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve. His conclusion?

"Greenspan bailed out the world's largest equity bubble with the world's largest real-estate bubble," he writes. "That combination easily equates to the biggest orgy of speculation and debt creation the United States (and the world) has ever seen."

Bernanke was left to sweep up after the debauch while Greenspan rewrote history in The Age of Turbulence.

I'm not sure that there is a whole bunch to learn from his book, so I'll wait until it hits the library.

What I find interesting, and well deserved, is that Greenspan will find himself increasingly reviled in the final years of his life.

In a very real way, this is more than a repudiation of Greenspan, but it is also a repudiation of Ayn Rand's Objectivism.

The fact that Greenspan endorsed the worst excesses of the market for ordinary people, but rushed to bail out the "noble entrepreneur", is a direct consequence of his experience of Ayn Rand's acolytes.