April 07, 2008

It is stunning how Greenspan can keep a straight face

Sir Alan Greenspan declares that “The Fed is blameless on the property bubble” April 7 and puts the blame instead with the investment community, like bank loan officers; and says “Regulators confronting real-time uncertainties have rarely, if ever, been able to achieve the level of future clarity required to act pre-emptively”. He also ends up by saying that “free competitive markets are the unrivalled way to organise economies.

I am stunned. How can he keep a straight face saying such things when he, as a regulator, did in fact outsource the real-time risk vigilance to the credit rating agencies and thereby helped to lead the market into the temptation of believing that the risk measurement by some few qualified eyes sufficed?

Please FT will you try to help me find out who on earth came up with the idea that the only risks that mattered for the financial sector were the risks of default and thereafter empowered the credit rating agencies to do the measuring?