El hombre que sabe

"The Man who Knows". Este es el título no oficial que había conseguido Alan Greenspan en su época de mayor influencia, cuando era el presidente del Council of Economic Advisors de La Casa Blanca durante la presidencia de Gerard Ford. En el anterior post ya he hecho mención al recomendable libro biográfico del personaje, de Sebastian Mallby, con el título "The Man Who Knows".

Ante el despliegue de conocimientos y prudencia de juicio de Greenspan en aquellos años, uno se pregunta por qué le abandonó después, cuando fue presidente de la FED y siguió un camino opuesto al que él recomendaba cuando sus previsiones acertaban plenamente y era consciente de los poderes desestabilizadores de las finanzas. En el párrafo siguiente se recogen dos ejemplos de esa capacidad, mezcla de la prudencia y del conocimiento mastodóntico que había adquirido de la economía americana, ejemplos que parecen que están previendo lo que iba a pasar bajo su mandato en la FED treinta años después.

In between the glittering parties, Greenspan maintained an impressive intellectual flow. In late 1979, he collaborated with Fortune on a long-run economic forecast, correctly predicting that falling inflation, lower corporate taxes, and deregulation would boost the incentives for business investment, turning the 1980s into a boom era. 28 In March 1980, he published an essay in Challenge that was equally prescient, but in an eerie way. Reflecting on the fragilities in finance, Greenspan showed how deeply he understood the demons that would haunt him as Fed chairman. 29 Greenspan’s Challenge essay was prompted by the fiftieth anniversary of the 1929 crash, which had heralded the Depression of the 1930s. If the nation was vulnerable to a repeat, Greenspan began, it would come not from the equity market but from housing. After all, home prices had nearly tripled during the 1970s, and because that bubble had been built on debt, a reversal would impose a long period of weak growth on the economy. Moreover, the risks from the housing bubble were magnified by the “extraordinarily complex development of international finance.” Bankers’ creativity outstripped public understanding of the risks entailed: “There are very likely to be structural inadequacies in these new financial innovations which the standard bailout procedures of the central banks do not fully address,” Greenspan wrote soberly. Banks and quasi banks were increasingly interconnected by daisy chains of lending, so that the failure of one could bring down others, and capital-asset ratios had been allowed to shrink alarmingly. Any bank that got into trouble “would have to be bailed out by its central bank or international agencies, or be absorbed by institutions not yet in difficulty,” Greenspan predicted. Despite his own record of opposing bailouts, Greenspan reassured his readers that a repeat of 1929 was highly unlikely—because bailouts were a certainty. At the first sign of a banking failure, central banks would ride to the rescue, even if they damaged long-run growth in the process. “The overriding mandate of the world’s monetary authorities to prevent a credit deflation almost assures policy overkill,” he wrote. “Deflation would be quickly aborted—to be followed shortly by . . . economic stagnation. . . . Thus, in today’s political and institutional environment, a replay of the Great Depression is the Great Malaise,” Greenspan concluded.