The Brian Lehrer Show

Seems U.S.' relation to capitalism turns out to be roughly uncannily parallel to China's relation to democracy...

Can Bill tell me who owns those trillion dollars of foreign currency reserve in China. It is my understanding that Greenspan provided the liquidity in the economy. That reserve really belong to all the foreign investors from USA, Europe, Hong Kong, Japan and Taiwan. Why do we think it is China's money?

Ex-Fed governor, Lawrence Meyer, told me that Greenspan was intellectually opposed to the Fed's considering asset price bubbles in the conduct of monetary policy, but the Fed should be there to help the economy once the bubble burst. (I have been told that Meyer wrote this in his memoir, but I haven't read the book http://www.amazon.com/Term-Fed-Insiders-View/dp/B0009K769Y/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1206366165&sr=1-4)

Comments from the author?

Rather than finance it, why didn't the Fed simply facilitate the sale of Bear Stearns to the highest bidder, within a given time frame?

Heaven knows the firm's present and future value is higher than the amount the Fed set via its financing...real estate alone...

So whose briefcase is MSN Money watching NOW?

Well inflation of goods & services WAS under control in the 1990s. So why did excess monetary stimulus show up in asset prices inflation instead of inflation in goods & services?

What is the safest currency -- even safer than gold? (Commodities are just contracts)

So this guy seems to think that instead of inflation "eatig eople alive," it ought to be unemployment that eats them alive.

This guy is full of sooooo many incorrect and incoherent ways of looking at things, I have much better stuff to do than to listen.

I support congestion pricing - if only to alleviate traffic in midtown at rush hour. I cannot believe there are a huge number of people who commute to mid- or downtown manhattan.

This crisis was largely a consequence of the failure of financial market regulators to impose higher margin requirements (downpayments) on real estate speculators (both institutional & individual) in combination with the emergence of so-called financial "innovations" such as mortgage securitization whereby there was a severance of loan origination & holding (resulting in an inevitable increase of imprudent risky real estate lending). If I make my money (via brokerage fees) solely by using your money to make loans to others I have no interest in how risky the loans are or become. To the extent that I can mask (via "securitization innovation") the increasingly risky nature of the loans I broker with your money, a no-margin requirement (no payment down) cycle feeding on ever-increasing real estate value bubble is created which must inevitably self-destruct. This Ponzi finance dynamic can be nipped in the bud in several ways - including stiff margin requirements for mortagages which inhibit such speculation as well as better regulation for transparency in "securitization". The regulators - the Fed, SEC, Treasury were asleep at the switch. Now we must all pay the price if the real economy tanks. As Keynes understood, radical laissez-faire, especially in financial market regulation leads to occassionally profound cyclical instability's which are the greatest threats to free markets & trade. Prudent interventionism is fundamental to long term financial & economic stability.

After the commercial real estate bubble of the early '90's burst, I was involved in providing quarterly research to the fed that would provide early warning of pending new bubbles. By its early warning nature, the research data was coarse because it was impossible to assemble the tradeable time series data that far in advance. I understood myself to be one of many- on a national scale providing information across asset classes. Pending trigger points were identified and followed up.

those interested in this type of info are advised to listen to Bloomberg On The Economy, Tom Keene -- on par w this program, rare praise indeed.