Mind Over Market

"You can't understand the United States at all unless you understand what's going in Europe," Greenspan stated in an interview on CNBC's Squawk Box October 7, 2011. "I think we have been through a remarkably elaborate program to try to find out whether the single currencies work," he said. Like others, Greenspan thought it would work in the beginning because the markets bought into the idea it would work. This could be seen in the pricing of the currencies in countries like Greece, Italy, Spain and Portugal as they moved toward currency union. As the date of currency union approached in each country, the spread in interest rates of local currencies above the German bund would narrow dramatically from a level of a hundreds of basis points. "I said and thought the markets are assuming that the Greeks and the Italians and the Spaniards and Portuguese are going to behave like Germans, and that's what [the markets] were telling us," ...

Part One: Part Two: CNBC Squawk Box hosts Joe Kernen, Becky Quick and Carl Quintanilla interviewed Alan Greenspan June 3 from the Department of Labor in Washington, D.C., where they had traveled to broadcast the show remotely. In his comments, Greenspan says that one of the missing parts of the economic recovery is the construction sector, missing partly because of the weak housing sector. According to research by his firm, Greenspan said, If the production of longer-lived assets had recovered as it has in the past, unemployment would be at 6 percent. Greenspan also supports raising income tax rates to the Clinton era levels, if necessary, for a budget agreement that reduces the deficit and debt outlook. Greenspan also does not believe that there will be a crisis after August 2, as Secretary Timothy Geithner has suggested, if the debt ceiling is not raised. Treasury is high likely to continue paying interest on the nation's debt service. The problem is that ...

Frontline states: In The Warning , veteran FRONTLINE producer Michael Kirk unearths the hidden history of the nation's worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. At the center of it all he finds Brooksley Born, who speaks for the first time on television about her failed campaign to regulate the secretive, multitrillion-dollar derivatives market whose crash helped trigger the financial collapse in the fall of 2008. This program, which aired October 20, performs a public service by reporting the story of the heroic efforts of Brooksley Born, the former Chairman of the U.S. Commodities Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), to address the risks in the over-the-counter (OTC) derivatives market more than a decade ago. Born's CFTC had the foresight and courage to issue a concept release in 1998 that asked the financial industry to do an analysis of the costs and benefits of potential regulation of OTC derivatives. Born had unwittingly taken a step that was seen by its opponents ...