← Back to context

Comment by dragonwriter

5 hours ago

The dot-com bust produced an EXTREMELY mild recession (so mild that it was often misattributed to 9/11, which occurred when it was almost over.

OTOH, there was a lot of pain iny the subsequent expansion leading up to the 2008 , but that was all the fault of fiscal (eepecially tax) policy of the Bush Administration and thei Congressional allies, not Fed monetary policy. While Greenspan clearly ideologically supported the people doing that, it wasn't him and the Fed causing the problems.

It was "mild" because they rolled the would-be losses into high-risk vehicles and strategies that eventually created the GFC, which included Fed policy to juice asset markets. The Dotcom bubble was the rolling over of the Reagan/Papa Bush-era savings and loan crisis (Greenspan was involved in that, too), and (tinfoil hats on now) a massive bond market liquidity crisis preceded the COVID pandemic flash crash and emergency liquidity injections/stimulus/PPP by a scant few months (and was quietly swept under the rug).

We deserve what we get if we don't act on the obvious pattern, at this point. We've spent half a century throwing the public under the bus just so that a few oligarchs don't have to pay out for their bad bets, and Greenspan was absolutely their man for a significant portion of that campaign in the class wars.