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Greenspan caused this recession with an unprecedented series of interest rate hikes designed to kill the stock market. Well, he killed the bull market, all right. And now he can't say a good word about tax cuts.

I agree with you on the tax cuts.

The recession is not so clear. If we are in fact at or near the bottom — and there are some indications that we are, although who knows for sure — then Greenspan pulled off a truly magical feat and he deserves a standing ovation.

You say he set out to "kill the stock market," but that isn't true. He did set out to pop a bubble — what he called "irrational exuberance."

No one really knows how to do that. The last time we had a bubble that bad, it ended in a decade of double-digit unemployment that went into the 20-per-cents before it was over. To hear the all-Democrat press talk, this is "the worst economy in fifty years," but that's just more "quagmire" from a press corps that wants to see Bush defeated at something — anything.

In the twenty years between 1975 and 1995, the unemployment rate was higher than it is now in every year but two. The unemployment rate was higher than it is now in Clinton's first two years in office, and was about the same in his third year. Did you hear all this doom and gloom back then? Hell no, it was "Happy days are here again."

If unemployment peaks at 6%, then Alan Greenspan popped a stock market bubble without throwing the whole economy into the tank. That's an amazing thing, because anybody who says he knew for sure how to to that is lying.

Did the bubble have to be popped? Absolutely. There was really crazy stuff going on, like the aquisition of Time-Warner — a company with serious assets like cable in the ground, household-name magazine properties, huge film libaries — by a thing that was really just a column of fast-moving air... as everybody found out afterwards.

That kind of stuff needed killing, and no one should fault the Fed for taking on that task. We could criticize how well they did the task, but if conditions now are as bad as it gets, we absolutely should not criticize them. 6% unemployment definitely qualifies as a "soft landing" compared to what could have happened.

You say he set out to "kill the stock market," but that isn't true. He did set out to pop a bubble — what he called "irrational exuberance."

Greenspan made that statement in December of 1996. Most of the bubble occurred after that statement, which is when he started targeting stock prices and the mythical wealth effect, instead of targeting stable prices. His policies led to the global currency problems of 1997 and 1998. The currency collapses and Y2K fears turned America into a super safe haven. And Greenspan was causing way too much interest to be paid on money seeking safe haven, making the problem even worse. Most of that bubble money went into large cap, well known names. That's where foreigners typically put their money. The irony is that most stocks didn't participate in the bubble. The Nasdaq advance-decline line was straight down from 1996 onward.

While our recent bubble has some similarity to the bubble of the late 1920's, a far more informative place to look is Japan's bubble of the late 1980's. Currency overvaluation and global "hot money" was also a factor there.

Had Greenspan wanted to correctly prevent the bubble in 1996, he should have attacked our strong currency rather than the stock market.