Congressmen who used to hang on every word and kiss his ring got rough with the former Fed chairman yesterday, as Henry Waxman bullied him to admit his fault for the subprime mortgage crisis (“Were you wrong?”) and got a qualified mea culpa (“Partially”).
The Greenspan grilling is at the respectable end of the national rage over the collapsing economy, bracketed on the far side of sanity by letters with white powder mailed to banks and regulatory agencies promising “payback time” for stealing people’s money.
The rhetoric is different, but the impulse is the same: If the crops fail, find the witches who made it happen and burn them. But that didn’t work in colonial times, and it certainly is not the answer to today’s far more complex mess.
Greenspan, with his Ayn Randish faith in market greed, is far from innocent in the growth of the monstrous housing bubble, but he had plenty of help from fast-buck financial operators, politicians who resisted regulation and overreaching homeowners who thought prices would never fall.