A decade ago, when Alan Greenspan was chairman of the mighty Federal Reserve, he was infamous for delivering ambiguous, Delphic speeches that nobody could understand. No longer. I recently had a chance to interview Greenspan, 88, at the Council on Foreign Relations, regarding an updated version of his latest book.
These days the retired Greenspan speaks so clearly that some of his words are still ricocheting around the blogosphere. For what he revealed on the CFR platform was that he harbours considerable doubts about whether recent western monetary policy experiments have actually helped economic growth. He also fears that such experiments have been so wild that it will be very hard to exit from these policies in the future – in the US or anywhere else – without sparking huge market volatility. Indeed, Greenspan is so worried about future turbulence that he apparently sympathises with investors (and central banks) who are currently stocking up on gold.
“Why do central banks put money into an asset which has no rate of return, but [has] cost of storage and insurance and everything else like that? Why are they doing that?” he asked rhetorically – before offering his own explanation. “Gold is a currency. It is still, by all evidence, a premier currency. No fiat currency, including the dollar, can match it.”