Greenspan riconosce di avere fatto un errore di previsione: le banche avrebbero dovuto salvarsi da sole. Col cavolo.

(Dal Financial Times)

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  ‘I made a mistake,’ admits Greenspan
  By Alan Beattie and James Politi in Washington
  
• Alan Greenspan, the former Federal Reserve chairman, said on Thursday the credit crisis had exceeded anything he had imagined and admitted he was wrong to think that banks would protect themselves from financial market chaos.
  “I made a mistake in presuming that the self-interest of organisations, specifically banks and others, was such that they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders,” he said.
  In the second of two days of tense hearings on Capitol Hill, Henry Waxman, chairman of the House of Representatives, clashed with current and former regulators and with Republicans on his own committee over blame for the financial crisis.
  Mr Waxman said Mr Greenspan’s Federal Reserve – along with the Securities and Exchange Commission and the US Treasury – had propagated “the prevailing attitude in Washington... that the market always knows best.”
  Mr Waxman blamed the Fed for failing to curb aggressive lending practices, the SEC for allowing credit rating agencies to operate under lax standards and the Treasury for opposing “responsible oversight” of financial derivatives.
  Christopher Cox, chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, defended himself, saying that virtually no one had foreseen the meltdown of the mortgage market, or the inadequacy of banking capital standards in preventing the collapse of institutions such as Bear Stearns.
  Mr Waxman accused the SEC chairman of being wise after the event. “Mr Cox has come in with a long list of regulations he wants... But the reality is, Mr Cox, you weren’t doing that beforehand.”
  Mr Cox blamed the fact that congressional responsibility was divided between the banking and financial services committees, which regulate banking, insurance and securities, and the agriculture committees, which regulate futures.
  “This jurisdictional split threatens to for ever stand in the way of rationalising the regulation of these products and markets,” he said.
  Mr Greenspan accepted that the crisis had “found a flaw” in his thinking but said that the kind of heavy regulation that could have prevented the crisis would have damaged US economic growth. He described the past two decades as a “period of euphoria” that encouraged participants in the financial markets to misprice securities.
  He had wrongly assumed that lending institutions would carry out proper surveillance of their counterparties, he said. “I had been going for 40 years with considerable evidence that it was working very well”.
  Republicans on the committee dissented from some of the Democratic attacks, and said the government-backed housing entities Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae had also been to blame.
  “It wasn’t deregulation that allowed this crisis,” said Tom Davis, the senior Republican on the committee. “It was the mish-mash of regulations and regulators, each with too narrow a view of increasingly integrated national and global markets.”
  Mr Greenspan said that when, as Fed chairman, he declined to advocate regulating credit default swaps – derivatives that have been blamed for worsening the crisis – he had been following the will of Congress.