Greenspan on the Economy: We've Never Seen Anything Like This Before!

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On Wednesday,  as the Federal Open Market Committee prepared to announce the end of the years-long asset purchase program known as Quantitative Easing, Alan Greenspan, the former Fed chair whose every utterance used to be parsed by market watchers, spoke before the Council on Foreign Relations and advised listeners that under current conditions, gold is probably a good investment.

Greenspan’s decision to publicly analyze the effectiveness of the QE program on the day his former colleagues were expected to announce its completion was remarkable timing.

 He does not see a smooth path ahead when the Fed ultimately starts to raise rates from zero . On raising rates, he says:

 If that’s so, maybe the gold idea is not such a bad idea, after all.

The former Fed chairman from 1987 to 2006 said the QE program had failed to achieve its primary goals. As a means of boosting consumer demand, the asset purchase program, he said, “has not worked,” though it did a good job of increasing asset prices.

Considering that Greenspan’s credibility as an economic forecaster was damaged by the collapse of the mortgage market, the financial crisis, and Great Recession that followed — all of which arguably sunk their roots during his tenure — he is still viewed by the mainstream media and financial analysts as one of the greatest Fed chairs in history.

In an interview on CNBC, Greenspan states, ” What we’ve had is a significant build up in the size of the Fed balance sheet through QE 1, 2 and 3 and up until a couple of months ago, we had very little indication that any of that was moving out of the fundamental reserve system into the commercial markets. 

So long as the reserves are sitting in the deposits of the [big banks] and the federal reserve banks, those are not having any active effect on commercial lending or economic activity. They have lowered interest rates, as a process of accumulating them, but they haven’t triggered any kind of spending through either increased loan demand until very recently. How significant it is or whether this is just another false dorn, remains to be seen.

I’m a little skeptical that it’s more than a short term phenomenon. This is a very difficult thing to forecast because we’ve never seen anything like this before.  “

Indeed, Greenspan is not alone in his sentiments. Economists are admitting that even with their best economically based forecasts, the situation the US is in, is unique in the history of mankind. No country of our size has accumulated as much debt. 

The money printing is new to our country, but economists are not sure of when we will see significant outcomes. the money directly Other countries that have printed money have always gone into severe or hyperinflation, with the concurrent debasement of the currency, sometimes into the currency being useless. 

As the Fed has not injected the trillions of dollars directly into the economy, so we are in a different situation than other countries who did just that.

In this grand experiment that the US has been force-fed by a private bank, the Fed, an unconstitutional entity being given the power to essentially control our economy, only time will tell how it plays out.