Greenspan sits on the fence

Alan Greenspan knows enough about the future of the US economy to instruct Congress not to enact more fiscal stimulus. He knows enough about the tightness of the oil markets to tell industrialised nations not to release oil from their strategic petroleum reserves. But when it comes to the Federal Reserve's self-designated job of providing the public with an assessment of the longer-term balance of risks to the economy, all Greenspan could do was shrug. The Fed surprised the market not with what it did (it left the overnight interbank rate unchanged at 1.25%), and not with what i...