Alan Greenspan

The Village Voice's cover story this week slams Andrew Cuomo as a sort of bumbling godfather of the current subprime mortgage crisis that has done so much to damage the American economy and to ruin lives.

A summarizing paragraph from the long story by legendary investigative reporter Wayne Barrett:

Andrew Cuomo, the youngest Housing and Urban Development secretary in history, made a series of decisions between 1997 and 2001 that gave birth to the country's current crisis. He took actions that—in combination with many other factors—helped plunge Fannie and Freddie into the subprime markets without putting in place the means to monitor their increasingly risky investments.

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For years and years a minority of savvy people would ask themselves, “Just how long can this go on?” The “this” was lending people money that they were not earning enough to repay. Now we know. Now the question is not how long can this go on but how come it went on so long.

Lending money to dubious risks is hardly something invented in the past 10 or 15 years. Until recently, however, the rule was that high risks paid high interest rates. The payday loan industry operates on that basis, as do the gangsters who lend to people gambling on sporting events.  read more »

Discussing George W. Bush's proposed economic stimulus package this morning from the podium at the A.B.N.Y. breakfast at the Sheraton, Charlie Rangel shied away from saying outright that he would discontinue the Bush tax cuts when they expire in 2010.

"As most of you know, there seems to be a lot of concern about whether or not the tax cuts of President Bush will be extended" he said. "Well, people have asked me, as Chairman of the [House Ways and Means] Committee, do we plan to extend these tax cuts in 2010?

"And I remind them--David Dinkins, who's older than me--that at 78 years old, I don’t buy green bananas," he went on. "And so I don’t know what’s going to happen in 2010."

Then Rangel, who is a long-time supporter of Hillary Clinton, said, "And after seeing the great fights on the screen last night at the Democratic debate, I don’t know what is going to happen in 2008."

He finished, "But having said that, it would seem to me that when we take a look back, not only did Hillary Clinton find her voice, but it seems like Chairman Greenspan has found his voice in saying that we should not have had those cuts unless what? Unless they were paid for."

“Now,” Alan Greenspan told The Wall Street Journal the other day, “it turns out politics is less important, domestically, than it was, because globalization is taking over an ever increasing part of the decision making process with the exception of national security.” What he says, many feel.  read more »

Now he tells us. Alan Greenspan has come out from behind the cloud of gas where he had hidden himself for the past couple of decades to say in public what he should have said years ago when it might have mattered.  read more »

In The Age of Turbulence, Greenspan speaks—and speaks and speaks and speaks, for more than 500 pages, destroying his reputation for laconic concision.  read more »

Senator Clinton had a bout of Glenn Thrush-induced amnesia on the subject of what she did on the Wal-Mart Board of Directors back in the day in Arkansas, but she's gone on the offensive against the retail mega-chain in recent days.

It was reported Friday that she returned donations from company execs. Now, The Politicker has obtained a letter(.pdf) from her to the Acting Chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (the guy who won't be replaced by Diana Taylor) in which she opposes Wal-Mart's application for federal insurance on deposits in a bank-like entity it owns.

This is hardly a radical position -- it's Alan Greenspan's stand -- and the letter is pretty Greenspanian. She writes to "express my serious reservations" about insuring deposits at "industrial loan companies," and adds, "I am concerned about the recent attempts of wholly commercial entities such as e Wal-Mart, to exploit a loophole in this existing prohibition in order to expand their reach into the banking and financial services realm."

Still, Hillary's friends in labor will no doubt notice.

The news that Manhattan real-estate prices took a plunge last quarter may not be the loud crack in t  read more »

Reuters reports that President Bush is about to announce Ben Bernanke, chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisors as Alan Greenspan's replacement. His resume doesn't look quite like Harriet Miers', and Brad DeLong, Berkeley economist who worked for Clinton, likes the appointment.  read more »

Dogs that don’t bark in the night have always captured my attention, and I suppose the same ca  read more »

Dogs that don’t bark in the night have always captured my attention, and I suppose the same can be  read more »

Dogs that don’t bark in the night have always captured my attention, and I suppose the same ca  read more »

Dogs that don’t bark in the night have always captured my attention, and I suppose the same can be  read more »

On Oct. 31, Daily News hockey columnist Sherry Ross got to write a hockey column of sorts.  read more »

In political circles, small as they are, the argument of late has been over whether or not 2004 is a  read more »

Pardon me if I don't understand this, Mr. and Ms.  read more »

One of the bubbles that has yet to be broken is the esteem in which Americans hold our Federal Reser  read more »

Guns or butter. Butter or guns. If you take both, you'll run out of funds.  read more »

Another Bush in the White House, another flagging stock market, another stumbling economy.  read more »

It's the new economy, stupid.  read more »

There is a place where smart bears gather.  read more »

Besides praying, we know that Dubya likes dogs.  read more »

The rivets are rattling, steam is escaping from the boilers,and the arrows on the dials are jiggling  read more »

Though it was shocking news, there was less gabble about it than you might have thought.  read more »

Maestro: Greenspan's Fed and the American Boom , by Bob Woodward. Simon & Schuster, 270 pages, $25.  read more »

The stock market, God help us, has become the social security system for half the population.  read more »

Big is better; biggest is best.  read more »

The current systemic mess in Asia's financial markets, by some seen perhaps to be moving ominously e  read more »