Greenspan shocked at failure of free markets

Alan Greenspan, the former Federal Reserve chairman, has finally stopped believing in the fiction of a self-correcting free market. In other words, he's realized that Ayn Rand is not only dead, but that she was a novelist.

• Greenspan shocked at failure of free markets
  
  
  • It was a remarkable moment: Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, a lifelong champion of free markets, publicly questioning the philosophy that guided him throughout his years as the world's most powerful economic policymaker.
    
    
  • Greenspan said that, in light of a crisis he characterized as "a once-in-a-century financial tsunami," he was wrong to think financial markets could police themselves. He incorrectly had expected the discipline of the market would prevent financial institutions from taking life-threatening risks.
    
    
  • Greenspan replied that indeed he had found a flaw in his ideology, one that left him very distressed. "In other words, you found that your view of the world, your ideology was not right?" asked Rep. Henry Waxman (chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform).
    
    
  • For his whole adult life, the former Fed chairman has been a devotee of the philosophy of Ayn Rand, who celebrated free-market capitalism as the world's most moral economic order and advocated a strict laissez-faire approach to government regulation of the marketplace.

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