Alan Greenspan couldn’t have picked a better week to hit bookshops. The Age of Turbulence (Penguin Press) is being published during turbulence on Wall Street and in a week where the Federal Reserve will cut interest rates (there will be cuts, right?) to boost an economy sandbagged by the subprime mortgage crisis—which many now blame on the fiscal policies of Alan Greenspan.
The Age of Turbulence was embargoed until its publication today, but leaks began to spring from the usual media suspects this past weekend--the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and the New York Times.
The New York Times reported on Saturday that Greenspan was appalled at the Republicans: "They [the Republicans] swapped principle for power. They ended up with neither. They deserved to lose" the 2006 congressional elections. There was also high praise for former Democratic president Bill Clinton, who Greenspan described as having "a consistent, disciplined focus on long-term economic growth." TheTimes also said that Greenspan was overjoyed when many from the old Gerald Ford administration, which he had served in, tripped back to Washington in the beginning of the George W. Bush administration: "I indulged in a bit of fantasy, envisioning this as the government that might have existed had Gerald Ford garnered the extra 1 percent of the vote he’d needed to edge past Jimmy Carter."
The Washington Post reported today that according to Greenspan it was "essential" to secure world oil supplies by removing Saddam Hussein and that "the Iraq War is largely about oil." On the other hand, he also denied that the Iraq War was a blatant oil grab: "No, no, no," he said. Saddam’s removal made "certain that the existing system [of oil markets] continues to work, frankly, until we find other [energy supplies], which ultimately will."
With all the Republican bashing that was going on it was only a matter of time before Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal rode to the rescue, picking out passages that damn the other side: "The next Democratic Party...has moved...very significantly in the wrong direction," Greenspan sadly lamented. He went on to say that "I’m saddened by the whole political process, and it’s not an accident that Republicans deserved to lose in 2006—it wasn’t that the Democrats deserved to win."
