Culmus - true
There has been clear benefit to the gamble Greenie has made. But I am not sure there has been a full account taken of the odds on that gamble or the consequences if it is not successful.
Still, it is true that if you've got a "debt" as big as was racked up with the Greenspan-produced bubble, it's more comfortable to pay it off over the course of 10-15 years rather than in 2-3. Then again, there are good arguments to be made that in trying to "smooth out" and spread the pain, the total pain is increased and more permanent and lasting damage is done. Greenspan's game with Wall Street this past February to open the floodgates on convertible debt may have looked nice to some and may have produced some temporary euphoria (from all the companies that should have gone on to bankruptcy and consolidation, and those fools invested in them, who instead of losing their investment watched it multiply four, five and ten-fold in some cases). But like with drugs, it's only a temporary high. Consolidation has to happen eventually for healing to take place, and avoiding it in 2003 will only prolong the suffering, and more importantly, result in pure waste of capital and human enterprise. So in the aggregate, there is a loss of net wealth to the world.
I think it is not unlike the repeal of Glass-Steagall. There is a huge addition of endemic risk introduced by that move. The two biggest stock market collapses in modern history were both directly preceded by repeal of similar legislation (our own in 1929, and the Japanese market's too). If the gamble works, we'll never know the risk. If it fails, we'll be looking at some kind of massive derivatives generated collapse of money center banks. And the world will finally see Greenspan for the massive gambler that he is, ricocheting from extreme to extreme trying to cover up his screw-ups.
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