Sympathy for Greenspan?

• Author: DeLong, J. Bradford

In the circles in which I travel, there is near-universal consensus that America's monetary authorities made three serious mistakes that contributed to and exacerbated the financial crisis. This consensus is almost always qualified by declarations that the United States has been well served by its Federal Reserve chairmen since at least Paul Volcker's tenure, and that those of us who have not sat in that seat know that we would have made worse mistakes. Nevertheless, the consensus is that U.S. policymakers erred when:

* The decision was made to eschew principles-based regulation and allow the shadow banking sector to grow with respect to its leverage and its compensation schemes, in the belief that the government's guarantee of the commercial banking system was enough to keep us out of trouble;

* The Fed and the Treasury decided, once we were in trouble, to nationalize AIG and pay its bills rather than to support its counterparties, which allowed financiers to pretend that their strategies were fundamentally sound;

* The Fed and the Treasury decided to let Lehman Brothers go into uncontrolled bankruptcy in order to try to teach financiers that having an ill-capitalized counterparty was not without risk, and that people should not expect the government to come to their rescue automatically.

There is, however, a lively debate about whether there was a fourth big mistake: Alan Greenspan's decision in 2001-04 to push and keep nominal interest rates on U.S. Treasury securities very low in order to try to keep the economy near full employment. In other words, should Greenspan have kept interest rates higher and triggered a recession in order to avert the growth of a housing bubble?

If we push interest rates up, Greenspan thought, millions of Americans would become unemployed, to no one's benefit. If interest rates were allowed to fall, these extra workers would be employed building houses and making things to sell to all the people whose incomes come from the construction sector.

Full employment is better than high unemployment if it can be accomplished without inflation, Greenspan thought. If a bubble develops, and if the bubble does not deflate but collapses, threatening to cause a depression, the Fed would have the policy tools to short-circuit that chain.

In hindsight, Greenspan was wrong. But the question is: was the bet that Greenspan made a favorable one? Whenever in the future the United States finds itself in a situation like 2003...