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Greenspan Was No Free-Market Champion, Mises Scholar Argues
A Mises Institute essay argues Alan Greenspan was an opportunist, not a free-market champion, pointing to his Fed interventions during the 1987 crash, dot-com bust, and housing boom.
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The late Alan Greenspan is often remembered as a champion of free markets. A new essay from the Mises Institute challenges that legacy directly.
Dr. David Gordon, writing in the institute's Friday Philosophy series, argues Greenspan was an opportunist whose actions contradicted the principles he claimed to hold. The piece draws on Greenspan's career at the Federal Reserve and his earlier intellectual influences.
Greenspan served as Fed chair from 1987 to 2006, a period that included the 1987 stock market crash, the dot-com bubble, and the housing boom that preceded the 2008 financial crisis. Gordon contends that Greenspan's interventions in markets – cutting rates after the 1987 crash, keeping rates low after the dot-com bust, and failing to rein in mortgage lending – were not free-market moves but pragmatic responses to political and market pressure.
The essay points to Greenspan's early association with Ayn Rand's Objectivist circle, where he was seen as a pro-market intellectual. Gordon argues that Greenspan abandoned those ideas once in power, choosing to manage markets rather than let them correct.