Isn’t Greenspan to blame for a lot of this mess with LOW INTEREST rates??
I think so. He was Mr. Bubble for years, when we needed a Paul Volcker to give us our castor oil, in order to avoid greater pain later. It's hard to cut off the punch bowl though, a fed chairman is much more popular if he keeps the party going right to the inevitable bitter end.
Poor Bernanke has inherited an impossible situation.
"There is no means of avoiding the final collapse of a boom brought about by credit expansion. The alternative is only whether the crisis should come sooner as a result of a voluntary abandonment of further credit expansion, or later as a final and total catastrophe of the currency system involved."
~~Ludwig von Mises
Actually, yes, at least in part. He correctly lowered rates to give liquidity after 9/11, but then failed to bring them back up quickly enough. The result was several years of easy money for borrowers.
He needed to raise rates, over time, at least 1 more percentage point before stopping. That should have been done back in 2003 or 2004.
this is, of course, my own opinion.