Fed had nothing to do with the financial collapse?
You're sh*ttin me! You can't be serious! And you spent your Xmas eve writing this joke, eh?
Some plebes are ignorant and need to L-E-A-R-N (no reference to Pelham).
As an FR Public Service to such plebes, I hereby submit the following teachable summary (copied to Pelham only because of below reference to Brooksley Born):
* Greenspan had a remarkable pre-history in the mid-1980s as a de-facto lobbyist for Charles Keating, the crooked financier responsible for the biggest fraud in the history of the S & L industry. Greenspan was then a consultant and in that capacity helped enlist the so-called Keating Five – the five top politicians most heavily implicated in helping the Keating scam (they were all senators – Alan Cranston, Dennis DeConcini, John Glenn, John McCain and Donald W. Riegle, Jr.).
* Greenspan opposed attempts by Brooksley Born, chair of the Commodities Futures Trading Commission, to crack down on fraud. Greenspan allegedly told Born that there was no need for a law against fraud. Greenspan was such a true believer in the efficient markets hypothesis that he apparently genuinely believed that market action alone would quickly prove an effective prophylactic against fraud. Black comments: “Greenspan, with the rabid support of the Rubin wing of the Clinton administration, along with Republican Chairman of the Senate Banking Committee Phil Gramm, crushed Born’s effort to regulate credit default swaps (CDS). The plutocrats and their political allies deliberately created what’s known as a regulatory black hole – a place where elite criminals could commit their crimes under the cover of perpetual night.”
* Greenspan refused to send examiners into banks to check out reports that their books were full of so-called liars’ loans. In the event such loans all but wiped out the U.S. banking system, and proved particularly toxic for Bank of America BAC +0.27% and Citigroup C +0.83% but also resulted in huge losses at Wells Fargo WFC +0.38% , J P Morgan Chase, and, via derivatives, American International Group.
Black’s conclusion is devastating: “Alan Greenspan had no excuse for assuming fraud out of existence, and his exceptionally immoral position on fraud and regulation proved catastrophic to America and much of the world.”
While many will consider the word "immoral" is going too far, another word Black uses elsewhere seems to fit: wacky. It is fair to say that Greenspan emerges as probably the biggest – and most dangerous – fool in American financial history.
You are concentrating on tree leaves and not roots.
Mortgage backed securities, bundling of prime and subprime debt, the exotic derivatives based on the are all things that happened to keep the Rube Goldberg machine moving.
As I’ve said repeatedly NONE of that would have come into existence without Washington forcing banks to loan money to those who traditionally would have been denied the mortgage.