Goodbye Mr. Greenspan…
His predecessor, Paul A. Volcker, had established that the central bank could hold off political pressure for lower interest rates with a tight-money strategy in the late 1970s and early 1980s. In the process, Mr. Volcker gave the Fed tremendous credibility in the financial markets and bequeathed to Mr. Greenspan plenty of room to shape policy in Washington.
- Alan Greenspan, Fed Chairman Through Prosperity and Crisis, Dies at 100, NY Times
By Gregg Wall (6-27-2026)
Mr. Greenspan, former FED chair... serving presidents Reagan, Clinton, and two Bush presidencies… died Monday. Greenspan was 100 and said to be suffering from Parkinson's. Before Reagan, Greenspan advised Nixon and served as an economic advisor to Ford. Greenspan was an Ayn Rand enthusiast and exhibited great fondness for economics, finance, markets, and laissez-faire capitalism. After Fed Chair Paul Volcker demonstrated FED independence and strangled inflation… in response to a lost decade and weak predecessors, with double digit rate increases… POTUS Reagan replaced Volcker with someone who was a great deal more flexible, perhaps more of a politician.
Greenspan’s fondness for deregulation and diminished regulatory controls dovetailed nicely with Reagan’s fondness for laissez-faire, and supply-side economics and Clinton’s deregulation, neoliberalism, and triangulation in the ‘90s. Faced with the crashes in ’87 and the Dot.com bubble, Greenspan embraced a strategy that has by now become rote: easy money, a flood of liquidity, slashed interest rates, and lower capital/reserve requirements for Wall St banks. This strategy, the Greenspan put -- essentially the bailout of banks, billionaires, and markets as too big to fail -- became the Bernanke, Yellen, and Powell puts.
Mr. Greenspan, known as the maestro, nearly escaped all this unscathed and was highly regarded by many; but the 2008 financial crash did tremendous damage to his firm belief in self-regulating markets, easy money, lax oversight over Wall St banks, and his reputation. Greenspan appeared to have fallen asleep at the wheel at a time of explosive growth in the derivatives industry, which were front and center, along with housing and moral hazard, as key causes of the 2008 financial crisis.
What then hath the maestro wrought? His legacy is certainly worth knowing.
The Federal Reserve has not only become the banker/lender of last resort but today, it’s also the sugar daddy of last resort. Thanks to the FED put, the consolidation of too big to fail Wall St banks, and America’s dependence upon the financialized economy (versus a real economy), the expectation is that the FED will wade into any crisis and save the day by printing money, slash rates, expand the balance sheet, monetize debt, and flood markets with a tsunami of cash.
As a result of the FED put and an establishment playbook of papering over any crisis with a wall of money, placing any crisis in the rearview mirror as quickly possible, there’s never any assessment of blame, responsibility, accountability. There is never any debate or discussion about America’s dependence upon Wall St greed, paper shuffling, algos, AI and program trading, arcane and hazardous financial products (that offer no intrinsic value to society), and derivative products. Essentially a misallocation of public resources. Nearly all of Wall St today is focused on gaming the system for short term gain, that is to say, a gambling den, a catastrophically leveraged & rigged casino. Financial news media seemingly looks to shoehorn a narrative into justifying and rationalizing price movements and trajectory (fundamentals and the reality that the market is moved by broad economic trends that are harmful to labour, the public, and taxpayer are conveniently omitted or receive short discussion if any). It’s assumed that this bailout cycle -- and taxpayer funded insurance program for banks, billionaires, and Wall St firms -- will continue indefinitely (some have argued that crashes, like SVB, are so lucrative that they are pre-planned and orchestrated). Post crash, congressional involvement is diminished, seemingly no debate required. Greenspan did this: privatized profits and socialized bailouts and losses.
With all this easy money sloshing around -- thanks to Greenspan, the FED, and fractional reserve banking -- the value of the dollar has shrank, asset values of the rich have skyrocketed. To the best of my knowledge, no politician has ever run on easy money policies, no FED chair has ever been elected by the public on these policies, nor has the public ever voted on these policies. This in turn has minted the world’s largest number of billionaires. Billionaires flush with assets and cash behave with impunity, by purchasing judges and politicians to ensure that their privilege, policies, and protections are preserved (to the detriment and at the expense of the American people).
Mr. Greenspan and his successors have wrought, via easy money and the FED put, explosive growth in the national debt: $2.35 trillion in ’87 when Greenspan started; $8.5 trillion in ’06 at the time of Greenspan’s retirement, Great Recession Eve; and today it’s $40 trillion. The maestro did that. Essentially enabling presidents and congress to spend like drunken sailors on shore leave. Trump, alone, is said to be responsible for approximately 20 to 25% of the national debt, enabled by successive FED chairs following Greenspan’s easy money template. The explosive growth in private equity and venture capital… that wage war against citizens, customers, families, labour, and the public daily… owes their entire business model to central bank easy money policies and cheap debt. The low yield or interest environment serves PE’s leveraged buyouts, while pushing institutional investors, in search of yield and return, into investing in their repugnant PE industry (private equity, of course, forever fixated on short term gain, the quick kill, instead of long-term success, sustainability, and sanity).
Then there’s the matter of all that blood, colonialism, empire, genocide, Israel, and wars the FED’s monetary policies facilitate and in conjunction with the Treasury fund. Who pays for all that? The U.S. taxpayer is the correct answer, but the FED enables it all by effectively working with the Treasury, and via easy money finances the U.S. empire. Essentially, FED easy money keeps the Imperial War Machine well lubricated, and our warmonger outpost in the Middle East, Israel and King Netanyahu, happy.
That’s some pretty grim stuff that rolls right up to the maestro, who set the bar. Notice, the net effect of Greenspan’s easy money policies, often take the American public, taxpayer, and voter right out of the equation, discussion, decision making, and debate. Which is precisely the way the billionaires, bankers, Wall St, and political class … aka the beneficiaries of easy money… like it. While leaving the American public on the hook for debt, deficits, and a devalued US dollar... an American public with decades of austerity, a depreciated currency, inflation, and significantly diminished futures to look forward to. Unless they revolt, as was done at the nation's founding? Isn’t that convenient.
And perhaps the greatest irony of all… all this easy money, financialization, greed, oligarchy, and M&A… ultra-accommodative monetary policy, monopoly formation, and private equity… all of it is highly detrimental to the FED’s dual mandate. A consolidated real economy, facilitated by Mr. Greenspan’s policies, means monopoly, monopsony, and totalitarian power over prices, especially the essentials, and extraordinary control over employment and wages. So that if we are looking for price stability, we’ll find none of that today, thanks to easy money. If we are looking for a functioning economy that produces well-paying jobs with a living wage, we’ll find none of that today (for 70 to 75% of individuals, at least), thanks to easy money.
The justification for Wall St, once upon a time, the tail and not the dog, was its ability to generate pools of capital for business, innovation, R&D and fund the government and programs. But increasingly, this justification has been overshadowed by the fact that the rigged financial markets have become both the ends and the means (a principle means and the least resistant path of wealth extraction), a vehicle to launder exorbitant privilege and redistribute that ever-depreciating privilege to a very few individuals and institutions.
Consider the risks involved in maintaining Mr. Greenspan’s extraordinarily leveraged financialized economy… AI automated trading, easy money benefiting predominately oligarchs, moral hazard, explosive growth in the money supply & dollar devaluation, soaring national debt, free reinsurance courtesy of the US taxpayer for Wall St, and the Greenspan put… such as a derivatives market with 1.25 quadrillion dollars in notional value. Is it worth it? Is a system that is beneficial to so few… beneficial to some of the nastiest people on the planet, billionaires… worth it? Finally, consider the hagiography surrounding Mr. Greenspan’s career, that has flooded the MSM and financial press. Is it accurate?
Copyright JM Hamilton Publishing 2026
