Alan Greenspan: Government Activism Creates Uncertainty Causing Risk Preventing Investment, Thus Ideal Regulation = Sufficient Capital.

So Now it is Europe’s and Then China/Asia’s Turn to Face a Severe Financial Downward Spiral

Hans Rosling’s famous lectures combine enormous quantities of public data with a sport’s commentator’s style to reveal the story of the world’s past, present and future development. Now he explores stats in a way he has never done before – using augmented reality animation. In this spectacular section of ‘The Joy of Stats’ he tells the story of the world in 200 countries over 200 years using 120,000 numbers – in just four minutes. Plotting life expectancy against income for every country since 1810, Hans shows how the world we live in is radically different from the world most of us imagine.

Alan Greenspan (born March 6, 1926) is an American economist who served as Chairman of the Federal Reserve of the United States from 1987 to 2006. He currently works as a private advisor and provides consulting for firms through his company, Greenspan Associates LLC. First appointed Federal Reserve chairman by President Ronald Reagan in August 1987, he was reappointed at successive four-year intervals until retiring on January 31, 2006 after the second-longest tenure in the position. Greenspan was born in the Washington Heights area of New York City. His father Herbert Greenspan was of Romanian-Jewish descent and his mother Rose Goldsmith of Hungarian-Jewish descent. Greenspan played clarinet and saxophone along with classmate Stan Getz. He further studied clarinet at the Juilliard School from 1943 to 1944, until dropping to play. Among his bandmates in the Woody Herman band was Leonard Garment, Richard Nixon’s Special Counsel presidential special counsel. In 1945 he attended New York University (NYU) and earned a B. S. in economics summa cum laude in 1948 and an M. A. in economics in 1950. At Columbia University, under the tutelage of Arthur Burns, he pursued advanced economic studies but dropped out. In 1977, NYU awarded him a Ph. D. in economics. His dissertation is not available from NYU since it was removed at Greenspan’s request in 1987, when he became Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board. However, a single copy has been found, and the ‘introduction includes a discussion of soaring housing prices and their effect on consumer spending; it even anticipates a bursting housing bubble’. From 1948 to 1953, Greenspan worked as an economic analyst at The National Industrial Conference Board, a business and industry oriented think-tank in New York City. From 1955 to 1987, when he was appointed as chairman of the Federal Reserve, Greenspan was chairman and president of Townsend-Greenspan & Co. , Inc. , an economic consulting firm in New York City, a 33-year stint interrupted only from 1974 to 1977 by his service as Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Gerald Ford. In the summer of 1968, Greenspan agreed to serve Richard Nixon as his coordinator on domestic policy in the nomination campaign. Greenspan has also served as a corporate director for Aluminum Company of America (Alcoa); Automatic Data Processing, Inc. ; Capital Cities/ABC, Inc. ; General Foods, Inc. ; J. P. Morgan & Co. , Inc. ; Morgan Guaranty Trust Company of New York; Mobil Corporation; and The Pittston Company. He was a director of the Council on Foreign Relations foreign policy organization between 1982 and 1988. He also served as a member of the influential Washington-based financial advisory body, the Group of Thirty in 1984. On June 2, 1987, President Ronald Reagan nominated Greenspan as a successor to Paul Volcker as chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve, and the Senate confirmed him on August 11, 1987. Investor, author and commentator Jim Rogers has said that Greenspan lobbied to get this chairmanship. Just two months after his confirmation he was faced with his first crisis—the 1987 stock market crash. His terse statement that the Fed ‘affirmed today its readiness to serve as a source of liquidity to support the economic and financial system’ is seen by many as having been effective in helping to control the damage from that crash. His handling of monetary policy in the run-up to the 1991 recession was criticized by the Administration as being excessively tight, and costing George H. W. Bush re-election. The incoming Democratic president Bill Clinton reappointed Greenspan, and consulted him on economic matters. Greenspan lent support to Clinton’s 1993 deficit reduction program. Greenspan, while still fundamentally monetarist in orientation, had eclectic views on the economy, and his monetary policy decisions largely followed standard Taylor rule prescriptions (See Taylor 1993 and 1999).