'The Age of Turbulence' by Alan Greenspan - Los Angeles Times

'The Age of Turbulence' by Alan Greenspan - Los Angeles Times: "For nearly 20 years Alan Greenspan, as head of America's central bank, was the most powerful economic central planner the world has ever seen. What did he do? Roughly twice a year, the Federal Reserve chairman had to make a substantive decision about whether to raise, lower or keep the level of U.S. interest rates the same.
 
Why is that important? To lower interest rates is to make the future more valuable relative to the present; to raise interest rates is to make the future less valuable. When the future is more valuable, more people in the economy focus their eyes on it and more actions are taken that will have an effect in the future: the building of factories, investment in research, construction of houses and apartments. To lower interest rates is to shift economic attention and focus from the present to the future. To raise them is to shift that balance back again.

Isn't this odd? Don't we have a market economy? Why should a central planner be setting interest rates? The only reason is that this system appears to work less badly than the alternatives we have tried. Institutions and human psychology lead financial markets to bounce back and forth between exuberant greed and catatonic fear. Times of fear generate high unemployment. Times of greed are likely to be times of destabilizing inflation. Whether the justification is in the terms of Milton Friedman, John Maynard Keynes or -- as Greenspan put it early in the Clinton administration, confusing everybody -- the pre-Keynesian Swedish school, economies seem to function better when intelligent, skilled and public-spirited technocrats perform the calming, coordinating and leaning-against-the-wind role of managing interest rates to curb greed and fortify fear with some low-interest-rate courage."

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(Via .)