--- Begin Message ---Gary North's REALITY CHECKIssue 122 March 7, 2002 ALAN GREENSPAN'S LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS The 1986 re-make of Roger Corman's 1960 "Little Shop of Horrors" still stands as the most improbable musical comedy of all time. It's the story of an obscure little man whose career is going nowhere. Seymour works as an assistant in a skid row flower shop. He is in love with his co-worker, Audry, but he has no career prospects, so he doesn't tell her how he feels. His boss, Mr. Mushnik, is an overbearing, grasping man who is always complaining about how bad business is. Seymour is played to a T by Hollywood's master of wimpetude, Rick Moranis. On the day after an eclipse, Seymour buys a peculiar looking little plant and brings it to the shop. He names it Audry II. For some reason, the plant attracts visitors into the shop. The flow of visitors and the flow of funds keeps increasing. Business soars. Mr. Mushnik (played by the appropriately named Vincent Gardenia) is ecstatic, but of course gives Seymour no credit. Yet Seymour deserves all the credit. When it comes to credit, Seymour is the source. But there is a major problem with the crowd-pleasing, publicity-attracting, money-generating plant. It feeds only on human blood. Seymour at first uses his own blood, but the plant keeps growing. It needs ever-larger quantities of blood. Seymour is desperate. The store's new-found economic success depends on this plant, as do Seymour's economic and romantic prospects, but the plant depends on blood. The plant talks. It talks only to Seymour. Its message never changes: "Feed me, Seymour!" One by one, Seymour finds new sources of supply. One by one, the film's characters are written out of the script. The movie was released almost exactly one year before Alan Greenspan took over as Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. This, I contend, was prophetic. So was the name of the movie's director: Oz. When we think of Oz, what do we think of? A little man behind the curtain. ALAN GREENSPAN (PLAYED BY RICK MORANIS) When Alan Greenspan took over as Chairman of the Federal Reserve, his career was headed towards skid row. Murray Rothbard, who had known Greenspan 30 years earlier when they were both on the fringes of Ayn Rand's movement, made this assessment of things to come in August, 1987, about six weeks before Greenspan formally took office. I found particularly remarkable the recent statements in the press that Greenspan's economic consulting firm of Townsend-Greenspan might go under, because it turns out that what the firm really sells is not its econometric forecasting models, or its famous numbers, but Greenspan himself, and his gift for saying absolutely nothing at great length and in rococo syntax with no clearcut position of any kind. As to his eminence as a forecaster, he ruefully admitted that a pension-fund managing firm he founded a few years ago just folded for lack of ability to apply the forecasting where it counted -- when investment funds were on the line. Rothbard spotted the power of Greenspan's syntax. This has been the continuing feature of Greenspan's long career, which is the opposite of his predecessor's style, Paul Volcker, who used his 6'7" frame and cigars to keep Congress intimidated. Instead, Greenspan keeps Congress off balance. The result is the same: a lapdog Congress. Rothbard added: Greenspan's real qualification is that he can be trusted never to rock the establishment's boat. He has long positioned himself in the very middle of the economic spectrum. He is, like most other long-time Republican economists, a conservative Keynesian, which in these days is almost indistinguishable from the liberal Keynesians in the Democratic camp. In fact, his views are virtually the same as Paul Volcker, also a conservative Keynesian. Which means that he wants moderate deficits and tax increases, and will loudly worry about inflation as he pours on increases in the money supply. The first key to understanding Greenspan's policies is this: "He can be trusted never to rock the establishment's boat." The second key is his connection to the world of investment banking. Alan is a long-time member of the famed Trilateral Commission, the Rockefeller-dominated pinnacle of the financial-political power elite in this country. And as he assumes his post as head of the Fed, he leaves his honored place on the board of directors of J.P. Morgan & Co. and Morgan Guaranty Trust. Yes, the Establishment has good reason to sleep soundly with Greenspan at our monetary helm. And as icing on the cake, they know that Greenspan's "philosophical" Randianism will undoubtedly fool many free market advocates into thinking that a champion of their cause now perches high in the seats of power. http://www.mises.org/freemarket_detail.asp?control=267&sortorder=articledate THE SELL-OFF: OCTOBER 19, 1987 On that fateful day, the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 508 points, down almost 23% for the day. Around the world, other stock markets fell by a comparable percentage. Greenspan had been on the Board as Chairman, filling Volcker's unexpired term, for a grand total of 8 days. The next day, October 20, the world's money markets were on the verge of a meltdown. A good account of how near to a disaster the capital markets were is provided in Bob Woodward's book on Greenspan, MAESTRO: GREENSPAN'S FED AND THE AMERICAN BOOM (2000). The WASHINGTON POST ran a long excerpt from it. Greenspan knew how the financial system's plumbing worked; an elaborate series of networks involving regular banks such as Citibank, investment banks such as Goldman Sachs and stock brokerage firms such as Merrill Lynch. Payments and credit flowed routinely among them. The New York Fed alone transferred more than $1 trillion a day. If one or several of these components failed to make their payments or to extend credit; or even just delayed payment in a crisis; they could trigger a chain reaction and the whole system could freeze up, even blow up. James Baker, the Secretary of the Treasury, was out of the country. Howard Baker, Reagan's Chief of Staff, called Greenspan, who was in Dallas to give a speech to the American Bankers Association. Baker sent a military plane to Dallas to fly Greenspan back to Washington. Here was the problem facing Greenspan: The immediate and pressing question was who would finance or give credit to the banks, the brokerage houses and others in the financial system that needed money. For practical purposes, the Fed was already giving credit in the hundreds of millions of dollars at the current interest rates in routine overnight loans. What were the limits? Would it pull the plug? Would the Fed's lending system be overwhelmed? There were both technical and policy questions. . . . They finally agreed on a one-sentence statement. Greenspan issued it in his name at 8:41 a.m. on Tuesday, Oct. 20, before the markets opened: "The Federal Reserve, consistent with its responsibilities as the nation's central bank, affirmed today its readiness to serve as a source of liquidity to support the economic and financial system." This was the solution: FED-issued money. This is always the solution. The FED has no other solution. It is only a matter of how to implement this solution. Woodward continues: After all, the Fed was in charge of the sovereign credit of the United States. It had the legal power to buy up the entire national and private debt, theoretically infusing the system with billions, even trillions, of dollars, more than would ever be necessary to restore liquidity and credit. In addition, there was an ambiguous provision in Section 13 of the Federal Reserve Act, the lawyers told Greenspan, that would allow the Fed, with the agreement of five out of seven members of the Fed's Board of Governors, to lend to institutions; brokerage houses and the like; other than banks. Greenspan was prepared to go further over the line. The Fed might lend money, but only if those institutions agreed to do what the Fed wanted them to do. He was prepared to make deals. It wasn't legal, but he was willing to do it, if necessary. There was that much at stake. At that moment, his job was to do almost anything to keep the system righted, even the previously inconceivable. It was not just the banks that were weak links. Even weaker were the brokerage houses, which enjoyed no government protection, at least not officially. But unofficially, they did. We can't hold it, [New York Federal Reserve Bank President Gerald] Corrigan said, with real panic in his voice. It's falling apart. There's not enough trust in the market, and it's going to melt down. He came up with a desperate contingency plan. Instead of just lending money -- guaranteeing liquidity to the banks -- the Fed would directly guarantee the payments between brokerage firms. But it would be a last, desperate measure. The plan, and the Fed's willingness to embrace it, had to remain a deeply guarded secret. If word got out, banks and brokerage houses would just seize on the guarantees and use them instead of their own money. It would give everyone an easy way out. . . . Then, at about 1 p.m., the Major Market index futures market staged its largest rally in history. Several major Wall Street firms bought a mere $60 million in future contracts on stocks, and the action sent a shock of brief optimism through the market. Because the buyer of futures contracts had initially only to put up a small portion of the money, the cost of these transactions was only a fraction of that $60 million. But the positive movement apparently triggered a significant number of buy orders in the underlying stocks. Some big institutions or wealthy investors had perhaps decided to gamble in order to stabilize or even save the market. Soon the Dow itself rallied, ending the day up 102 points, a record gain. http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A1742-2000Nov11?language=printer There we have it. This is our financial system, in all of its leveraged fiduciary glory. It rests on the confidence of trading insiders and on the promise of the Federal Reserve System to inject credit money into the economy. It also rests on the highly leveraged futures market, where those going long -- "Who are those guys?" -- can get so much more bang for the buck. THE SELL-OUT: OCTOBER 20, 1987 There were numerous conference calls throughout the days of this crisis, but only the October 20 meeting of the Open Market Committee (FOMC) has transcripts, says the Federal Reserve. Parts of these minutes have been posted on-line. They are quite revealing. We discover the following: (1) the committee, which buys government debt with the FED's newly created money, was winging it; (2) there was a possibility that the FED's offer of new money would not be accepted by high-level institutional borrowers, and therefore would not save the payments system from gridlock; and (3) the international value of the dollar was not collapsing, which no one could explain clearly. CHAIRMAN GREENSPAN. I think we're playing it on a day-to-day basis. And in a crisis environment. I suspect we shouldn't really focus on longer-term policy questions until we get beyond this immediate period of chaos. MR. ANGELL. But I presume that there's at least an acceptance by the members of the Committee that the $600 million on borrowings is not necessarily in place in the coming two weeks as well as in the reserve maintenance period now ending. CHAIRMAN GREENSPAN. Yes. Does anybody disagree with Governor Angell's comment on this? MR. STERNLIGHT. Mr. Chairman, I'd like to think that there's a particular element of flexibility here because I suspect there may be some greater reluctance by banks to borrow in this kind of-- MR. JOHNSON. I agree with Peter on that. I think that one of the problems we may run into, and we've already seen it, is a strong unwillingness to borrow. And trying to force the borrowing target in that environment could result in an unbelievable funds rate. So, I agree with Peter: he needs the flexibility, at least for a while, to manage that situation. We just don't know what we're up against, at least for a while, in this kind of situation. What bears repeating is their concern with the financial system's unwillingness to borrow. "And trying to force the borrowing target in that environment could result in an unbelievable funds rate." What would be an unbelievable federal funds rate? What it is today: 1.75%, down from 6% in January, 2001. This is what it took to get the "players" to borrow in 2001. Then there was the question is the levitating dollar in the midst of an international crisis. CHAIRMAN GREENSPAN. I want to ask Sam Cross if he will explain to us why the dollar is as strong as it is in this environment. MR. CROSS. That's a very good question and I wish I had a good answer for it. We've been asking ourselves and others that, without any really very convincing response. Certainly, there has been some liquidating of things abroad as people have brought funds back into the United States either for meeting their own liquidity needs or for other purposes. It is now time to quote the French proverb, "The more things change, the more they stay the same." Why is the dollar so high today, when the FED is pumping in new money (St. Louis FED's Adjusted Monetary Base) at over 20% per annum? "That's a very good question and I wish I had a good answer for it. We've been asking ourselves and others that, without any really very convincing response." The agreed-upon answer was this: foreigner investors were in even worse shape that American investors were. CHAIRMAN GREENSPAN. In part, I think, the issue obviously is that potentially defaulting investors in dollar securities were drawing funds out of other currencies. That presupposes that the declines in the other markets were not doing the reverse, which I assume is where you come out. MR. CROSS. Yes. Perhaps reflecting what Peter is talking about. In our bond market there has been some tendency to move into Treasury bonds as kind of an attractive place at this point, given the chaos in so many of the equity markets around the world. But I think there certainly has been liquidation of overseas positions. http://www.federalreserve.gov/fomc/transcripts/1987/871020ConfCall.pdf * * * * * * * * * Advertisement * * * * * * * * * Don't Miss This Profit Alert from What May Be the Greatest Stock-Picking Team in America! This team uncovers winners in every sector. Now they're watching a company that's riding the home-building phenomenon now sweeping America. You could make a potential 273% profit from this tiny building supplier... This company is growing wildly - because people are pouring money into their houses. It has a P/E of 8, a market cap of US$173 million, and over a billion in sales! Learn how you can discover buy opportunities like these, and immediately gain access to this winning stock: http://www.agora-inc.com/reports/TRZ/WantProof * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * ALAN GREENSPAN: BI-POLAR SCHIZOPHRENIC? On his ninth day on the job, Chairman Greenspan launched his career as the most famous schizophrenic in American central banking history: a gold standard advocate who became the maestro of credit money expansion. First, we read his 1966 survey of the history of money and the gold standard, "Gold and Economic Freedom." An almost hysterical antagonism toward the gold standard is one issue which unites statists of all persuasions. They seem to sense -- perhaps more clearly and subtly than many consistent defenders of laissez-faire -- that gold and economic freedom are inseparable, that the gold standard is an instrument of laissez-faire and that each implies and requires the other. He then offered a short history of money in a division of labor society. Money is the common denominator of all economic transactions. It is that commodity which serves as a medium of exchange, is universally acceptable to all participants in an exchange economy as payment for their goods or services, and can, therefore, be used as a standard of market value and as a store of value, i.e., as a means of saving. The existence of such a commodity is a precondition of a division of labor economy. If men did not have some commodity of objective value which was generally acceptable as money, they would have to resort to primitive barter or be forced to live on self-sufficient farms and forgo the inestimable advantages of specialization. If men had no means to store value, i.e., to save, neither long-range planning nor exchange would be possible. . . . In the early stages of a developing money economy, several media of exchange might be used, since a wide variety of commodities would fulfill the foregoing conditions. However, one of the commodities will gradually displace all others, by being more widely acceptable. Preferences on what to hold as a store of value, will shift to the most widely acceptable commodity, which, in turn, will make it still more acceptable. The shift is progressive until that commodity becomes the sole medium of exchange. The use of a single medium is highly advantageous for the same reasons that a money economy is superior to a barter economy: it makes exchanges possible on an incalculably wider scale. Whether the single medium is gold, silver, seashells, cattle, or tobacco is optional, depending on the context and development of a given economy. In fact, all have been employed, at various times, as media of exchange. Even in the present century, two major commodities, gold and silver, have been used as international media of exchange, with gold becoming the predominant one. Gold, having both artistic and functional uses and being relatively scarce, has significant advantages over all other media of exchange. Since the beginning of World War I, it has been virtually the sole international standard of exchange. . . . When banks loan money to finance productive and profitable endeavors, the loans are paid off rapidly and bank credit continues to be generally available. But when the business ventures financed by bank credit are less profitable and slow to pay off, bankers soon find that their loans outstanding are excessive relative to their gold reserves, and they begin to curtail new lending, usually by charging higher interest rates. This tends to restrict the financing of new ventures and requires the existing borrowers to improve their profitability before they can obtain credit for further expansion. Thus, under the gold standard, a free banking system stands as the protector of an economy's stability and balanced growth. When gold is accepted as the medium of exchange by most or all nations, an unhampered free international gold standard serves to foster a world-wide division of labor and the broadest international trade. Greenspan then offered a cogent history of fractional reserve banking and its pitfalls. Commercial banks are innately inflationary, he said. They, in turn, require a central bank to protect them against bank runs and to keep credit money coming into the economy. If banks can continue to loan money indefinitely -- it was claimed -- there need never be any slumps in business. And so the Federal Reserve System was organized in 1913. It consisted of twelve regional Federal Reserve banks nominally owned by private bankers, but in fact government sponsored, controlled, and supported. Credit extended by these banks is in practice (though not legally) backed by the taxing power of the federal government. Technically, we remained on the gold standard; individuals were still free to own gold, and gold continued to be used as bank reserves. But now, in addition to gold, credit extended by the Federal Reserve banks ("paper reserves") could serve as legal tender to pay depositors. The problem is, we cannot safely trust central bankers to do the wise thing. Their ability to inflate the national currency tempts them to keep alive their credit- money-created economic boom by new injections of credit money. This is what happened, 1927-29. 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. 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 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. With a logic reminiscent of a generation earlier, statists argued that the gold standard was largely to blame for the credit debacle which led to the Great Depression. What central banking is really all about, Greenspan said in 1966, is the funding of the welfare state. National politicians do not want to raise taxes in order to fund their forced transfer of wealth, so they prefer to borrow newly created money. The problem is, the gold standard thwarts the banks' creation of new money. This is why the many defenders of the welfare state hate the gold standard. Stripped of its academic jargon, the welfare state is nothing more than a mechanism by which governments confiscate the wealth of the productive members of a society to support a wide variety of welfare schemes. A substantial part of the confiscation is effected by taxation. But the welfare statists were quick to recognize that if they wished to retain political power, the amount of taxation had to be limited and they had to resort to programs of massive deficit spending, i.e., they had to borrow money, by issuing government bonds, to finance welfare expenditures on a large scale. Under a gold standard, the amount of credit that an economy can support is determined by the economy's tangible assets, since every credit instrument is ultimately a claim on some tangible asset. But government bonds are not backed by tangible wealth, only by the government's promise to pay out of future tax revenues, and cannot easily be absorbed by the financial markets. A large volume of new government bonds can be sold to the public only at progressively higher interest rates. Thus, government deficit spending under a gold standard is severely limited. The abandonment of the gold standard made it possible for the welfare statists to use the banking system as a means to an unlimited expansion of credit. They have created paper reserves in the form of government bonds which -- through a complex series of steps -- the banks accept in place of tangible assets and treat as if they were an actual deposit, i.e., as the equivalent of what was formerly a deposit of gold. The holder of a government bond or of a bank deposit created by paper reserves believes that he has a valid claim on a real asset. But the fact is that there are now more claims outstanding than real assets. The law of supply and demand is not to be conned. As the supply of money (of claims) increases relative to the supply of tangible assets in the economy, prices must eventually rise. Thus the earnings saved by the productive members of the society lose value in terms of goods. When the economy's books are finally balanced, one finds that this loss in value represents the goods purchased by the government for welfare or other purposes with the money proceeds of the government bonds financed by bank credit expansion. In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation. There is no safe store of value. If there were, the government would have to make its holding illegal, as was done in the case of gold. If everyone decided, for example, to convert all his bank deposits to silver or copper or any other good, and thereafter declined to accept checks as payment for goods, bank deposits would lose their purchasing power and government- created bank credit would be worthless as a claim on goods. The financial policy of the welfare state requires that there be no way for the owners of wealth to protect themselves. This is the shabby secret of the welfare statists' tirades against gold. Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the confiscation of wealth. Gold stands in the way of this insidious process. It stands as a protector of property rights. If one grasps this, one has no difficulty in understanding the statists' antagonism toward the gold standard. (This article originally appeared in a newsletter called The Objectivist, published in 1966, and was reprinted in Ayn Rand's Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal.) http://www.321gold.com/fed/greenspan/1966.html Fast forward 36 years. Here are Greenspan's latest version of the history of money, in a speech delivered in 2002, on January 16. (That's right, Randians: January 16. But during the day.) The history of money is the history of the triumph of the bank note, he now says. Its success has been made possible by central banks' ability to reduce inflation over the past two decades. The history of money is the history of civilization or, more exactly, of some important civilizing values. Its form at any particular period of history reflects the degree of confidence, or the degree of trust, that market participants have in the institutions that govern every market system, whether centrally planned or free. To accept money in exchange for goods and services requires a trust that the money will be accepted by another purveyor of goods and services. In earlier generations that trust adhered to the intrinsic value of gold, silver, or any other commodity that had general acceptability. Historians, digging deep into the earliest evidence of human practice, link such commodities' broad acceptability to peoples' desire for ostentatious gold and silver ornaments. Many millennia later, in one of the remarkable advances in financial history, the bank note emerged as a medium of exchange. It had no intrinsic value. It was rather a promise to pay, on demand, a certain quantity of gold or other valued commodity. The bank note's value rested on trust in the willingness and ability of the bank note issuer to meet that promise. Reputation for trustworthiness, accordingly, became an economic value to banks -- the early issuers of private paper currency. They competed for reputation by advertising the amount of capital they had to back up their promises to pay in gold. Those banks that proved trustworthy were able to broadly issue bank notes, along with demand deposits, that is, zero interest rate liabilities. . . . In the twentieth century, bank reputation receded in importance and capital ratios decreased as government programs, especially the discount window and deposit insurance, provided support for bank promises to pay. And, at the base of the financial system, with the abandonment of gold convertibility in the 1930s, legal tender became backed -- if that is the proper term -- by the fiat of the state. The value of fiat money can be inferred only from the values of the present and future goods and services it can command. And that, in turn, has largely rested on the quantity of fiat money created relative to demand. The early history of the post-Bretton Woods system of generalized fiat money was plagued, as we all remember, by excess money issuance and the resultant inflationary instability. Central bankers' success, however, in containing inflation during the past two decades raises hopes that fiat money can be managed in a responsible way. This has been the case in the United States, and the dollar, despite many challenges to its status, remains the principal international currency. [Note: according to the inflation calculator that is on the Web site of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics -- http://www.bls.gov -- the U.S. dollar has lost almost half of its purchasing power since 1981. It takes $1948 today to buy what $1,000 bought in 1981.] If the evident recent success of fiat money regimes falters, we may have to go back to seashells or oxen as our medium of exchange. In that unlikely event, I trust, the discount window of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York will have an adequate inventory of oxen. http://www.federalreserve.gov/boarddocs/speeches/2002/200201163/default.htm Seashells! Discount windows! He's got a million of 'em! Jokes, I mean. Not seashells. This system won't work until there is a commodity futures market for seashells. Otherwise, it will take too many seashells for the unnamed and unidentified buyers in a to prop up the system when the inevitable bank runs begin. When I compare his 1966 history of money with his 2002 history of money, I conclude that this man is in desperate need of ideological lithium. He has a bi-polar ideology. Well, not really. It only seems this way. Rothbard warned of this back in 1987. As an alleged "laissez-faire pragmatist," at no time in his prominent twenty-year career in politics has he ever advocated anything that even remotely smacks of laissez-faire, or even any approach toward it. For Greenspan, laissez-faire is not a lodestar, a standard, and a guide by which to set one's course; instead, it is simply a curiosity kept in the closet, totally divorced from his concrete policy conclusions. Thus, Greenspan is only in favor of the gold standard if all conditions are right: if the budget is balanced, trade is free, inflation is licked, everyone has the right philosophy, etc. In the same way, he might say he only favors free trade if all conditions are right: if the budget is balanced, unions are weak, we have a gold standard, the right philosophy, etc. In short, never are one's "high philosophical principles" applied to one's actions. It becomes almost piquant for the Establishment to have this man in its camp. FEED ME, ALAN! From October 20, 1987, until today, Alan Greenspan has presided over a debt-based money system that keeps coming perilously close to the abyss, ever more frequently: the Asian crisis in 1997, the near default and bail-out of Long Term Capital Management in 1998, the collapse of the NASDAQ in 2000, the crisis of September 11, and the bankruptcy of Enron. He is indeed the maestro. He has us all trapped in a fiat money world in which it's either maestro or maelstrom. The economy survives, but only by means of ever larger injections of the FED's credit money. Debt increases at every level in every sector. It never gets repaid; it constantly increases. It has to increase; otherwise, the economy could go into gridlock, in which debtor A cannot pay debtor B because debtor C has not paid him. (Debtor C is incorporated in Barbados and cannot be located.) Greenspan has called this scenario "cascading cross defaults." This phrase appeared in his Congressional testimony a few weeks after the LTCM crisis. http://www.federalreserve.gov/boarddocs/testimony/19981001.htm Like Audry II, America's debt-fed, blood-sucking, fiat money economy cries out, "Feed me, Alan!" By now, Alan is way beyond what the FED alone can supply. He has to find new donors. Government Sponsored Enterprises (GSE's), especially those that supply money for residential mortgages, are the main donors today. But they are reaching the limits of their ability to locate credit- worthy first-time home buyers and home owners who are willing to re-finance. The words of Mr. Johnson echo down the halls of the FED. I think that one of the problems we may run into, and we've already seen it, is a strong unwillingness to borrow. And trying to force the borrowing target in that environment could result in an unbelievable funds rate. We've got that rate today. What comes next? When the beast calls out once again, "Feed me, Alan," who will supply the next meal? We should not be like Mr. Mushnik. We should give Greenspan -- our very own Seymour -- full credit. After all, he gives the rest of us full credit. And for as long as we accept his offer, the system will continue, devouring all available equity caught in its path. CONCLUSION In the original director's cut of "Little Shop of Horrors," the plant ate Seymour and Audry, and then escaped into the world. This ending upset pre-release audiences, so a less threatening ending was substituted. We all like happy endings. I wish I could think of a happy ending for Alan Greenspan. So do the script writers, of whom he is chief. This script is being re-written daily. Now, more than ever, what Mr. Johnson said of Alan Greenspan on October 20, 1987, rings true. He needs the flexibility, at least for a while, to manage that situation. We just don't know what we're up against, at least for a while, in this kind of situation. * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * -- Been to the Daily Reckoning Marketplace Yet? -- If not, you ought to see what you've been missing. Want to read more from our regular contributors? This is the place to find it. We've collected some of the best financial advice and commentary available anywhere and presented it to you all in one place. 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