WELL, at least he doesn’t have to worry about irrational exuberance any more.
You remember the famous term coined by then-Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan back in 1996 to encapsulate his conflicts about the rising tide of stock prices in the US?
Back then, the Dow Jones industrial average was at about 6,400, Citigroup was trading at $43 a share and Jack Welch‘s General Electric had hit $100 (it has since split 3-for-1), but at $9 a share now who’s counting.
Yea, good thing Maestro Greenspan was worried back then – things were pretty frothy then, in retrospect. Trouble is, the chairman seemed to have used up all his worry beads fretting about the wrong bubble.
When it came to the housing bubble he aided and abetted with gusto in the last years of his reign, Greenspan now acts blissfully unaware.
As he’s confessed in recent testimony and interviews, he didn’t even know the extent of the mortgage-derivatives problem when he was in office, and he wouldn’t have been able to do anything about it if he did.
Yes, 82 seems to be a good age for a makeover – at least if you’re the Maestro.
In fact, last week the best-known disciple of Ayn Rand performed the intellectual equivalent of throwing her under the bus by proffering that nationalizing some big US banks might not be just a bad idea after all.
And no wonder. Greenspan has been doing a lot of second-guessing these days.
Despite a speech late last year in which he said he expected the economy to rebound rather quickly, Greenspan is now warning that we are in the “longest and steepest” recession since the Great Depression – perhaps the worst in a century.
Long before joining government in the 1970s Greenspan was known as a genial economist and a particularly bad forecaster. Those character traits do not seem to have been altered despite more than three decades in Washington.
The problem is, even though Greenspan’s stock has been falling of late he still grabs headlines and the attention of the markets.
Greenspan has been out of office for more than three years now, and he has made tens of millions from his post-Fed activities. But in doing so, Greenspan has also made his successor’s job even harder than it already is, and raised many questions about competence during his own 18-year regime.
For the good of the economy and for the good of the stock market, it’s time Ol’ Al just learns to shut up.
TERRY KEENANis anchor of Cashin’ In, an in vesting program that ap pears on Fox News Channel on Saturday mornings at 11:30. E-mail terry.kee nan@foxnews.com.