Alan Greenspan’s legacy (opens in new tab)

He was not a crook!If Volcker symbolized the neoliberal turn in monetary policy, Greenspan embodied its financial side. He saw enough of the late-1990s stock-market mania to warn of “irrational exuberance,” but he treated the bubble as something the Fed should not seriously confront and continued to promote deregulation, including the dismantling of Glass-Steagall and the resistance to controls on derivatives.That was not merely an error of forecasting. Greenspan’s faith in self-regulating fi...