Commentary: Puncturing the myth of Alan Greenspan, whose policies gave us the Great Recession

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Set us as preferred Noah Cross, the archvillain of the movie “Chinatown,” had the definitive line on how old age brings respectability.“‘Course I’m respectable,” he tells Jake Gittes.

“I’m old.Politicians, ugly buildings and whores all get respectable if they last long enough.”I wouldn’t necessarily slot former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan into any of those categories, but the general reaction to his death Monday at age 100 puts the lie to Cross’ observation.

As much as he was revered during his nearly two decades as Fed chairman for protecting the stock market from a series of crashes and near-crashes, his obituaries take a more measured view.The headline on the Wall Street Journal’s main take on his legacy is: “The Myth of Alan Greenspan as ‘The Maestro.’”Stripped of its academic jargon, the welfare state is nothing more than a mechanism by which governments confiscate the wealth of the productive members of a society to support a wide variety of welfare schemes.— Alan Greenspan, writing as an Ayn Rand cultist (1966)The Journal blames Greenspan for fostering “the great credit mania of the mid-2000s” and observes that “the music stopped in 2008, producing the panic that did so much harm to the free-market economy that Greenspan promoted.” That was the Great Recession, which started with the 2008 crash in the housing market and persisted into 2012.That is from a publication that was more or less in accord with Greenspan’s goals of less regulation and lower taxes.

His contemporary adversaries were harsher.“R.I.P.

Alan Greenspan: You were charming, thoughtful, powerful, and wrong,” writes Robert Reich, who served as Bill Clinton’s Labor secretary while Greenspan led the Fed.Commentary on economics and more from a Pulitzer Prize winner.

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