Quote of the day

Alan Greenspan was on the Hill today to blame everyone else for the complete meltdown of the financial industry and the global economy during a meeting of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission. In between trying not to blame banks or financial giants for what happened and blaming homeowners and poor people, Big Al offered up this assessment of how fuckin' awesome he thinks he is.

Greenspan: When you've been in government for 20 years, as I have been, the issue of retrospective and figuring out what you should have done differently is a really futile activity... My experience has been, in the business I was in I was right 70 percent of the time, but I was wrong 30 percent of the time and there are an awful lot of mistakes in 21 years.

Angelides: Would you put this in the 30 percent category?

Greenspan: I don't know.

Gee, you're only awesome 3/4th's of the time? How "man of the people" of you. Just one question, are you counting that whole "failure to foresee any of the massive problems that contributed to the global financial apocalypse and in many ways contributing to and exacerbating the problems" as one problem within the 30% or as comprising the entire 30%? Because it was a pretty massive fuck-up that seems like it could hardly be contained in the latter, so it seems like you're sweeping the "greatest economic collapse since the Depression" into the single mistake category, like that time you called your secretary Jane instead of Jan.

I know you think 70% is good and you're being modest, but you need to stop thinking of it in baseball terms. Sure if you were on the Yankees and were hitting .700, we'd be enshrining you in the Hall as we speak. But, say, if you were at a Community College and you were getting 70% of things right, you'd be well on your way to failing to get that two year degree in air conditioning maintenance and repair. You're a low-C/high-D student. As the state of the economy shows, that might just be a generous estimate.