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.

Greenspan: "Whoops, my bad."

Greenspan Urges Tighter Regulation After `Breakdown'

Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan called for tighter regulation of financial companies, distancing himself from the free-market culture that he helped to create.

Firms that bundle loans into securities for sale should be required to keep part of those securities, Greenspan said in prepared testimony to the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. Other rules should address fraud and settlement of trades, he said. Greenspan's office released the text ahead of the hearing scheduled for 10 a.m. in Washington.

The comments contrast with Greenspan's aversion to increasing financial supervision as Fed chairman from August 1987 to January 2006. He said in a May 2005 speech that ``private regulation generally has proved far better at constraining excessive risk-taking than has government regulation.''

Well golly, almost two decades, excuse me, two fucking decades of telling people to de-regulate or not to regulate you finally decide when you have no power and the bitter fruits of that harvest have come in that the fiscal policy you subscribed to over those two decades wasn't exactly the smartest thing and now we should do the exact opposite. Let me break out the slow golf clap for you. All it took was a complete global financial collapse putting the giant exclamation point on your tenure as Fed Chairman to see that self-regulation and no regulation are stupid ideas.

Thanks for finally coming to the table on that one. When you were telling everyone that the markets had become more stable than ever, when you fiercely attacked any attempt to put derivatives under scrutiny, opposing even minimal regulation, and cutting interest to the lowest rates ever it would have been nice if you told us it was all bullshit. But you're telling us now in a valiant effort to rehabilitate your legacy image the markets. You must have spent ages looking for that spine, I'm glad you found it. Your place in the stockades is third from right, you'll be here all morning, don't mind all the rotten fruit being thrown, it's part of the deal.