Alan Greenspan: I Haven’t Been Optimistic In Quite A While

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Former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan spoke with Tom Keene and Mike McKee for Bloomberg TV & Radio. He discussed the ramifications of negative interest rates, Dodd-Frank, U.S. oil production, and his lack of optimism about the markets. Here is Greenspan from August 2015 – not sure what happened…  Alan Greenspan: Be Afraid Of Pending Bond Market Bubble

On negative interest rates, Greenspan said: “Negative interests rates have no effect, why? Because people are willing to accept, essentially, a negative interest rate to hold the claims of these particular countries. That’s going to change if this goes on indefinitely because somebody’s going to start to move…it is clearly non-productive and that is to have this type of situation is a distortion. The big argument about excessively low interest rates for a very long period of time is that it warps the investment pattern on real investments.”

On the state of the U.S. and global economy, he said: “We’re in trouble basically because productivity is dead in the water…Real capital investment is way below average. Why? Because business people are very uncertain about the future.”

On whether he is optimistic going forward, Greenspan said: “No. I haven’t been for quite a while. And I won’t be until we can resolve the entitlement programs. Nobody wants to touch it. And that is gradually crowding out capital investment, and that’s crowding out productivity, and it’s crowding out the standards of living where do you want me to go from there.”

On Dodd-Frank, he said: “The regulations are supposed to be making changes of addressing the problems that existed in 2008 or leading up to 2008. It’s not doing that. ‘Too Big to Fail’ is a critical issue back then, and now. And, there is nothing in Dodd-Frank which actually addresses this issue.”

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