Alan Greenspan: feted for failure

Alan Greenspan was at the wheel, apparently asleep, when the US economy drove off a cliff. Why on earth is he still lionised?

Dean Baker
Tuesday 15 February 2011 17.21 GM

The Brookings Institution stands alongside Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, among the nation's elite intellectual institutions. This is why it so striking that it chose to invite former Federal Reserve board chairman Alan Greenspan to give the keynote address at a forum on reforming the home mortgage finance system last week.

It would be difficult to imagine a more disastrous failure than Alan Greenspan. Tens of millions of people are unemployed, under-employed, or have given up looking for work altogether, as a direct result of Greenspan's ineptitude. Millions of families are facing the lost of their homes. More than one quarter of mortgage holders are underwater with their mortgages.