JIM LEHRER: But you don’t feel any responsibility for keeping interest rates low?
JIM LEHRER: Because interest rates were down, it was easier to buy a house?
ALAN GREENSPAN: Absolutely.
JIM LEHRER: And the market boomed.
ALAN GREENSPAN: And the market boomed.
JIM LEHRER: It boomed too much?
ALAN GREENSPAN: Well, yes, I think it did boom too much.
ALAN GREENSPAN: Well, let me tell you. We had no choice. I mean, we’re the vaunted Federal Reserve, but this global force was suppressing us. We actually tried in 2004 to get mortgage interest rates up and to put some sort of clamp on the extent of the housing boom, and we failed, because usually when we move short-term interest rates up, which is what the Federal Reserve does, long-term rates go with it. It didn’t this time. We tried the same thing in 2005…
JIM LEHRER: Didn’t happen?
ALAN GREENSPAN: Didn’t happen. Had we done it back in 2002, there’s no doubt in my mind nothing would have happened. And as a consequence, we and, in fact, every other central bank could not confront this issue.
And what I’m increasingly beginning to conclude is, when you get bubbles like this, there is no way of diffusing them until the speculative fever breaks on its own. We tried numbers of things, and other people tried numbers of things.
Vidéo : le diagnostic réservé du docteur Greenspan
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Greenspan : la chute de l’immobilier plus importante que prévu