Brooking No Excuses from Alan Greenspan
Pardon the headline pun, but there is hardly a more comfortable place to float a re-writing of your own personal history than the conservative enclave known as the Brookings Institute. The Greenmeister laid his golden egg yesterday at that worthy institution, a forty-eight page paper that expressed some remorse. And yet, wetting a finger to the friendly winds in the audience, the ex-Fed-Chief who ate the American economy pleaded that "little could be done to identify a bubble before it burst, much less to pop it." Except of course, those who forecast it, those who made billions short-selling it and those who pleaded for investigations of the likes of Bernie Madoff, Lehman Brothers and AIG. An even halfway hungry dog might have wandered away from his food-bowl long enough to sniff out itinerant workers buying $700,000 homes.
Forget the family spaniel's instincts, Alan Greenspan was sanguine as hedge fund managers copped $100 million a year, stock prices reflected forty times earnings ra…