Greenspan: Not Me! Gorbachev! Brazil! Investors!
When I was growing up my mother used to say the same person caused every mishap around our house. That person stuck a screwdriver in the TV, broke the talking robot, hid the dirty dishes under the fridge, poured lemonade on the Roger Whittaker album, etc. Who was it? NotMe -- or Not Me, to be linguistically precise, because that it was what my brothers and I used to always say when accused: "Not me! Not me!"
I had a similar feeling today in reading Alan Greenspan's WSJ column about subprime. He found fault pretty much everywhere but in his own actions in explaining the current subprime-related credit problems in the U.S. It was glasnost and the end of the Cold War; it was emerging economies; it was low-priced exports; it was market euphoria, etc. It just wasn't, you know, him.
About the closest Mr. NotMe comes to saying "Me" is in this typically evasive paragraph:
I do not doubt that a low U.S. federal-funds rate in response to the dot-com crash, and especially the 1% rate set in mid-2003 to counter potential deflation, lowered interest rates on adjustable-rate mortgages (ARMs) and may have contributed to the rise in U.S. home prices. In my judgment, however, the impact on demand for homes financed with ARMs was not major.
"Not major". Okay. But that's not the same thing as saying it's not "minor". So, where, in the continuum between major and minor would you put it, Mr. NotMe?
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