Alan greenspans biography

The reason that Greenspan took the monetary actions he did, I am sure, is because at the time he thought they were the best policy. He was far from sure that the increase in house prices posed a danger that could not be managed; he would have been skeptical about the Fed’s ability to pop a bubble, at least not without large collateral damage; and he surely did not anticipate that losses in mortgage markets would touch off a global liquidity panic, which arguably made the crisis and its economic effects much worse. In any case, the tightening cycle that began in June 2004 was arguably the most aggressive of any since the early 1980s. Perhaps Greenspan and the FOMC should have tightened even more quickly—we are still debating the issue, more than a decade later—but the fact that the pace of rate hikes in 2004-2005 was not sufficient to stop house price increases does not fit well with the view that minor tweaks in monetary policy would

•

Alan Greenspan

Alan Greenspan was President Gerald R. Ford’s Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors.  Under President Ronald Reagan he was appointed Federal Reserve Chairman and served in that capacity from 1987 until 2006. He is an Honorary Trustee of the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Foundation.

Alan Greenspan was interviewed for the Gerald R. Ford Oral History Project on December 17, 2008 by Richard Norton Smith.

Click Here to Download This Interview as a PDF

Smith: First of all, obviously, thank you for doing this.

The afternoon of August 8^th, 1974 was your confirmation hearing.  How did that come about?  How did the offer of the Council of Economic Advisors come about and what is the Council of Economic Advisors?

Greenspan: Well, let me start with telling you what the Council of Economic Advisors is.  It’s a very small economic consulting operation with one client, the President of the United States.  And its power is wholly proport

•

Alan Greenspan: Brief Bio, Policies, Legacy

Who Is Alan Greenspan?

Alan Greenspan is an American economist who was the chair of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve (Fed), the United States' huvud bank, from 1987 until 2006. In that role, he also served as the chair of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), which fryst vatten the Fed’s principal monetary policymaking committee that makes decisions on interest rates and managing the U.S. money supply.

Greenspan fryst vatten best known for largely presiding over the Great Moderation, a period of relatively stable inflation and macroeconomic growth, that lasted from the mid-1980s to the financial crisis in 2007.

Key Takeaways

• Alan Greenspan is an American economist and former chair of the Federal Reserve.
• Greenspan's policy was defined by the Great Moderation, or the long-term maintenance of low, stable inflation and economic growth.
• The expansionary monetary policy of "easy money" attributed to Greenspan'