Greenspan se defiende (otra vez)

Hace unas semanas, Alan Greenspan escribió un artículo en el Financial Times titulado "We will never have a perfect model of risk" en donde trataba de defenderse de las imputaciones que se le han hecho recientemente sobre su posible responsabilidad en el desarrollo de la crisis hipotecaria en Estados Unidos.

Ese artículo fue duramente criticado por especialistas en el foro de debate del Financial Times. Vean, por ejemplo, los siguientes comentarios:

Alice Rivlin: Greenspan is right, of course, that we will never have a perfect model of risk in a complex economy. But the culprit was not imperfect models. It was failure to ask common sense questions:

Q: Will houses prices keep going up forever?
A: Not likely.

Q: What will happen to the value of mortgage-backed securities when housing prices stop rising or fall?
A: They will go down.

We didn’t need fancy models to answer questions like that. We just needed to ask them.

Paul De Grauwe: So the reason why we have this financial crisis is that we can’t forecast the future. What a deep insight. We have never been able to forecast the future, but this did not necessarily lead to a financial crisis.

Greenspan’s article is a smokescreen to hide his own responsibility in making the financial crisis possible. (...)

Greenspan, who was at the helm of the most important monetary institution in the world, failed to take his responsibility to supervise the financial markets blinded as he, and his colleagues, were by a belief that markets and bankers know better than governments.

Martin Wolf: I have to say that I find myself in agreement with the critics of Mr Greenspan’s article, the ideology he displays and some of the policy decisions made at the Fed in the 2000s.(...)

First, Mr Greenspan ignores the now overwhelming evidence of malfeasance and gross incompetence in the chain of agents, from mortgage origination to the ultimate holders, including rating agencies, banks, investment banks, and so forth. This is not just about poor risk management. It is far worse than that. This was a huge failure of regulation.

Second, we do have to look very carefully at the incentives at work inside the financial system - a subject Mr Greenspan ignores. It is not just about ignorance. It is about wilful ignorance.

Pues bien, el día de hoy, Alan Greenspan ha publicado un nuevo artículo en el Financial Times titulado "A response to my critics".

No es muy difícil anticipar una nueva andanada en contra del Maestro, sobre todo a la luz del reciente reporte del FMI que mencionamos aquí hace unos días.