<quote name="Charles Curley" date="Sat, 6 Dec 2008 at 07:19 -0700"> > On Sat, Dec 06, 2008 at 12:47:22AM -0700, Andy Bradford wrote: > > Thus said Charles Curley on Fri, 05 Dec 2008 21:56:21 MST: > > > > > A lot of Austrian economists are to be found, not on campus, but on > > > Wall St. making money with investments, Alan Greenspan formerly > > > being an example. Peter Schiff is another. Walter Block, at Loyola > > > University in New Orleans, is an excellent counter example. > > > > I would hardly call Alan Greenspan an Austrian Economist. He may > > have been at one point in time, very close to that school of > > thought, but I believe he strayed from that a long time ago. > > I quite agree, and was very careful to say, "formerly". Read some of > the things he wrote back in his Ayn Rand days and compare those with > his actions as head of the Fed. Heck, compare those with his action of > taking the job. John Galt was smarter than that.
Here's a notable writing from "back in the day." http://www.constitution.org/mon/greenspan_gold.htm It's too bad Greenspan had no cajones. Here's an interesting paragraph. [] = my own insertions. When business in the United States underwent a mild contraction in 1927, the Federal Reserve created more paper reserves in the hope of forestalling any possible bank reserve shortage. [note this is when we were still on the "gold standard," which as you can see, is no standard at all, but yet in the following years the "gold standard" was blamed, which standard we grossly deviated from already!] More disastrous, however, was the Federal Reserve's attempt to assist Great Britain who had been losing gold to us because the Bank of England refused to allow interest rates to rise when market forces dictated (it was politically unpalatable). The reasoning of the authorities involved was as follows: if the Federal Reserve pumped excessive paper reserves into American banks, interest rates in the United States would fall to a level comparable with those in Great Britain; this would act to stop Britain's gold loss and avoid the political embarrassment of having to raise interest rates. The "Fed" succeeded; it stopped the gold loss, but it nearly destroyed the economies of the world, in the process. The excess credit which the Fed pumped into the economy spilled over into the stock market, triggering a fantastic speculative boom. Belatedly, Federal Reserve officials attempted to sop up the excess reserves and finally succeeded in braking the boom. But it was too late: by 1929 the speculative imbalances had become so overwhelming that the attempt precipitated a sharp retrenching and a consequent demoralizing of business confidence. As a result, the American economy collapsed. Great Britain fared even worse, and rather than absorb the full consequences of her previous folly, she abandoned the gold standard completely in 1931, tearing asunder what remained of the fabric of confidence and inducing a world-wide series of bank failures. The world economies plunged into the Great Depression of the 1930's. Now again in 2008 we're trying to keep that credit flowing... sound familiar?? Von Fugal -- Government is a disease that masquerades as its own cure -- Robert Lefevre
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