Quote:
Originally Posted by Orruar
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I'm pretty sure libertarian monetary policy would have been to abolish the Fed's interest rate target and instead letting the rate float freely to its market value. He purposefully set the interest rate well below the known market value to goose the economy.
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Yes. Greenspan was the chairman of the Federal Reserve; his entire job was to manipulate the economy. That's not very libertarian. He directly caused the 2008 housing crash by lowering interest rates after the dot-com crash, then raising them in 2006 before leaving things to his protégé Bernanke, who is now building an even bigger bubble which will burst fairly soon now.
However, I suspect Lune was referring to abolishing Glass-Steagall. I personally would have kept that law, as I think it's one of just a few regulations that actually have a net positive, but even there I don't think its repeal was nearly as critical as the bank bailout. If we had simply let our banks go broke, we would have emerged from the crisis just fine (Iceland is a great example here). Instead, and this is where the corruption thing comes in, we bailed them out to the tune of 15 trillion dollars.