Yves Smith on Greenspan

Yves Smith is devastating today:

It’s one thing for Greenspan to sell books and give speeches to try to salvage his reputation. Nixon did that too, with more success and less profit. It is quite another for him to benefit in a far more direct fashion from the devastation he created, by hooking up with the fund that scored the biggest kill from the worst aspects of the negative real interest rates that Greenspan put into effect.

Overly cheap credit always and inevitably leads to bad investments, And Greenspan of all people should have known that. How he can rationalize his actions then and now is beyond me. But I forgot. Objectivism means never having to say you’re sorry.

Actually, it is worse than that. More than 50 years ago, this country could be awakened from its nightmare of Joe McCarthy-led Communist-in-every-closet witch hunting by the exposure of McCarthy’s methods in the first nationally televised Congressional hearings. The pivotal moment occurred when a Boston lawyer, Joseph Welch, rebuked McCarthy with the now-famous phrase, “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?”

But decency and propriety mean nothing in America these days. What used to be recognized as corruption is now shrugged off as business as usual. When a nation loses its moral compass, it also loses its soul.

I’m with Smith. Click on the link for the story.