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Showing posts from August 8, 2008

US Fed not doing McCain any favours

Business Times - 08 Aug 2008 His only hope of winning the White House is if voters ignore their economic situation By LEON HADAR WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT FORMER Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan recalls in his memoirs, The Age of Turbulence, that one of his four bosses, president George HW Bush blamed him for his re-election loss in 1992 against Democratic challenger Bill Clinton. In fact, as Mr Greenspan noted in a recent interview on US Public television (PBS), the first president Bush blamed him 'fully' for his failure to get re-elected for a second term. Why was Mr Bush so upset about the policies of Mr Greenspan's Fed? 'We started to ease interest rates after the credit crunch in the late-80s and he felt that we were not lowering them sufficiently rapidly to re-galvanise the economy,' Mr Greenspan told PBS, adding that 'the Federal Reserve essentially, in a unanimous voice, disagreed with him'. Mr Greenspan insisted that the Fed's monetary pol