At 08:41 AM 3/23/00 -0800, you wrote:
>I suspect that Greenspan, like Clinton, were very fortunate in presiding at a
>time of prosperity and riding old wave of good luck -- sort of like the TV
>weather personality grinning because it going to be a beautiful
>day. Well, who
>knows, maybe the weather is going to be a little bit rough.
yeah, the US boom doesn't seem to have much to do with Greenspan, since
it's driven by steeply rising profit rates up to 1998 and high profits
since then, which stimulated investment and luxury consumption. It's also
is driven by the resulting optimistic expectations, which can be seen in
the stock market bubble and the rise of private-sector debt. It's also
driven by the dramatic borrowing from the rest of the world, along with low
US import prices due to the stagnation persisting there (and the high US
dollar exchange rate). The high dollar has also put a competitive lid on
the prices of export goods. Greenspan also benefited from dramatic changes
in labor-power markets (weakening unions, increased worker insecurity,
etc.) that seems to have lowered the measured NAIRU beyond his wildest
dreams, so that his posited "speed limits" for GDP became irrelevant.
However, Greenspan differs from a weather-clown in that he has some impact
on the "weather." We have to consider Marx's opinion (in ch. 34 of vol. III
of CAPITAL) that even though monetary policy can't abolish crisis
tendencies, it can make things _worse_.
Clinton can also make things worse. If the Federal government's
contractionary fiscal policy hadn't been counteracted by the debt-driven
private spending boom, we'd already be in a recession.
Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] & http://liberalarts.lmu.edu/~jdevine
