Someone Needs to Get an New Aphorism.

Just how many times can you keep recycling the stale phrase « Pyromane Pompier » without looking stupid?

Artus: Yes. Greenspan was an arsonist and a fireman combined. He derived all his glory from his reaction to the savings-and- loans crisis, to the collapse of Long-Term Capital Management LP, and to Sept. 11, 2001. But LTCM and the savings-and-loans crisis were his doing. He absolutely failed to see where the malfunctions in the U.S. economy were.
Greenspan came up with a phrase, ``irrational exuberance,'' in 1997, but he didn't do anything about it.

He was seeking glory? That’s news to anyone in the real economy. Besides, what do you think the Fed should de with markets? Control their every detail? I’ll bet!

Artus: The most modern central banks are the Bank of England and the Bank of Sweden.

The Bank of England is the only central bank that has factored real-estate prices into its policy making, and that also looks at exchange rates. It has a global vision of the economy, and that's what we like. They completely slipped up when it came to the banks, but that was the Financial Services Authority, it wasn't them.

``Les incendiaires'' is published by Perrin.

There are people who would debate that the former Exchequer’s butchery of the Bank of England was very modern, given the recent run on the banks that they’ve had. Nor would anyone really believe that an economy like Sweden’s is some sort of powerhouse so depended on by others that it can’t make a display of its experiments.

On the other hand, the United States has a population which is actually growing, which is why it needs growth. We have had 11 straight years of it preceded by 6 years in upward trend. Our unemployment rate has at the same time been nominally half that of the “big-dogs” of the Euro zone. In that whole period of world-wide expansion, Euro-land has yet to hit anything even close to that pitch while the acceleration of their economies took nearly a decade longer to start. – Even the one this great sage Patrick Artus had a hand in influencing through his punditry.
Yet the entire finance and currency conversation is about the US “stagnating” as it sheds bad loans that the whole world, sage and dismissive, couldn’t resist as an investment.

What did they want US banks to do? Keep redlining?