Greenspan's Legacy

Economics Economics Questions
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1

As apart of an independent study course that I will be doing in the spring semester, I will be doing a debate on the legacy of Greenspan’s career at the Fed. The format of the debate is that there will be two teams, one arguing for a positive intepretation of it and the other vice versa, each team will have around 4 members, and during the debate each member will have around five minutes to support the team’s overall thesis with debate occuring before almuni of my college (University of Massachusetts Amherst if you desire to know). Of course, I plan on trying to convice my team ( the anti-Greenspan team) on taking a position hinging on the Austrian theory of the business cycle described mostly in neoclassical terminology as done by Roger Garrison in his powerpoint presentations.

What I request is ideas and help on both how to a, convice my team to take this position, b, formulate a thesis that both is undiluted as much as possible and quick to explicate, and c, how I should go about describing it.

The Austrian materials that I have at hand now is Human Action (3rd Edition), an rather decrepid copy of Man, Economy, and State another rather dated copy of Prices and Production (I got the previous three at my university’s library thus their ancientness), 15 Great Austrian Economists, Economics in One Lesson, and Theory and History plus whatever I can find online (which is pretty much everything).

Thanks for your help.

2

Is the rest of your team also Austro-libertarian, or at least sympathetic?

3

I would focus on his drastic rate cuts in 95 and again in 2000.

4

Stefan Karlsson’s latest article on the LVMI website is good.

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6

In my opinion the best single book about Alan Greenspan is the very compact and detailed volume “Greenspan’s Bubbles” by Fred Sheehan and Bill Fleckenstein. The book is good when it comes to Greenspan (“Greenspan erred by continually picking an interest rate that was too low”), but has minor flaws because it portraits earlier FED chairmen in so good light (“Prior to Greenspan’s arrival at the Fed, excluding the brief mania for commodities and precious metals from late 1979 to early 1980, the country had beeb bubble free for over 50 years.”). The book has some free market tendencies but is not an Austrian book as such, although it uses some Austrian sources such as articles by Jim Grant.

I also warmly recommend reading the chapter “The Fabulous Destiny of Alan Greenspan” in volume “Financial Reckoning Day” by Bill Bonner and Addison Wiggin. I think you will find other books pulished by Agora Financial also useful.

7

To answer wombatron’s question: I don’t know the leanings of my felow debate team members (ignorence is biss