Inside Alan Greenspan’s nightmare

Mark Weisbrot

News that wages are rising in China is greeted with dread by those who share Greenspan’s unwarranted fear of rising inflation

Alan Greenspan had a dream, or rather a nightmare. Greenspan seems to have woken up in a cold sweat one morning in fear that the period of “disinflationary pressures” that had kept inflation low since the 1990s was about to end. This was 2007, when he published his autobiographical economic treatise, The Age of Turbulence. Despite his well-known love for economic data, and poring over the latest reports from every statistical agency, he did not realise that he was sitting on a housing bubble of epic proportions. Not seeing the bubble (he also missed the prior stock market bubble that accumulated and burst on his watch, causing the 2001 downturn), he could not know that it would soon collapse and cause a very ugly recession, in which inflation would be irrelevant.

This by itself should be enough to question the wisdom of central bankers, since the evidence for both of these world-historic asset bubbles was blindingly obvious once they had reached a certain size. But Greenspan’s nightmare is scary for other reasons, some of which will become increasingly relevant as the world economy recovers.

As Greenspan details in his book, the reason for his nightmare is that the world was depleting its stock of hundreds of millions of unemployed people, including those of the former Soviet Union and also in rural China. In other words, “too many” of them had become employed, and this was allowing for wages of factory workers in China to rise. So long as China had a huge mass of unemployed, wages were held in check, and – according to Greenspan – competition from low-wage production there held down wages in the rest of the world, including even rich countries like the United States. All good! Until the nightmare started.

Full Story: Inside Alan Greenspan’s nightmare | Mark Weisbrot | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk.