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  • Hacker News
  • time to watch inside job from 2010 again
    by mediumsmart
  • Mostly I just know Alan Greenspan for being a disciple of Ayn Rand back in the 1950s/60s. Though the Objectivists didn't like his work at the federal reserve. In 2008 he admits to being shocked that banks weren't rationally selfish.
    by fouc
  • Interesting bit of trivia, Greenspan was in Ayn Rand's inner circle and read her drafts of Atlas Shrugged as it was being written, and they were close friends until her death.
    by helterskelter
  • IIRC it was Greenspan that didn’t mean to, but did disclose the use of gold swaps, so even if there is all the gold that is claimed to be in Fort Knox, the question of who owns the gold is unanswered.
    by shrubble
  • My favorite bit of Greenspan lore:

    Texas Senator Phil Gramm (pretty sure it was him) was a prominent GOP member of the Senate Banking Committee. Of course, Greenspan often testified there.

    Gramm would always ask Greenspan, along with his other questions, “Mr. Chairman, what’s the ideal capital gains tax rate?”

    Greenspan never missed a beat: “Zero.”

    Agree or disagree, you always knew where he stood!

    by twoodfin
  • When I was in high school in the 90s, and just discovering the world of money and finance, I stumbled on Alan Greenspan and instantly liked some of his thinking about it. I tried my best to learn from everything he did, read every news article I could find, followed rates, the economics of money, the impact on markets, and more. I learned more about government politics and money and influence from that experience than I have since! I'll admit that my mindset about the Fed and money in general is very much due to what I learned in those impressionable years.
    by jameszol
  • Greenspan was also the subject in the weird comics "h4x0r economist"/"haxor economist", which thankfully still live on since its early internet days https://www.rdwarf.com/users/kioh/ (NSFW language)
    by kzrdude
  • I'm not a gold bug but Alan was a proponent of the gold standard. He wrote about how the gold standard created responsible spending and more equality in the world:

    https://ritholtz.com/2008/11/gold-and-economic-freedom-by-al...

    The world we are in now, especially in the US, is one where there is near unlimited government credit but it is, according to many, papering over deep structural problems. At some point, these chickens will come home to roost in some way or another. But it is hard to predict when.

    So he was in favour of the gold standard because it prevented massive unconstrained expansion of credit and that seems sensible.

    by bhouston

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