Calling time on Greenspan

Congress has always gone out of its way to seek Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan's counsel on fiscal policy. Yet at no time has Greenspan taken the initiative the way he did on Capitol Hill with his six-monthly report. It was a bolder, hungrier Greenspan. It was also an exercise in bad judgement. His previous attempts to influence fiscal policy were more subtle. During the 1990s, he was an omniscient presence guiding Congress toward deficit reduction, even dangling the carrot of monetary stimulus in front of President George Bush (the father) as a quid-pro-quo for a deficit-r...