Word: stocks
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Dates: during 2000-2000
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This wasn't the way the script read. Remember how everything was going to go kooky when all those zeroes lined up in a row? We were promised a global computer shutdown, a stock market crash, a Blade Runner world. But the lights never went out, and the sun came up in the morning. Then John McCain was going to win the nomination, the Red Sox were going to win the World Series, Marion Jones was going to win five gold medals and Tommy Lee was going to win Pamela Anderson's heart back. No, no, no and no. Even...
...afford not to do it. This has been Bush's way of softening the fiscal ground ever since the fall. The economy is slowing down. Consumer confidence is fading, the "wealth effect" of the rising stock markets is a pleasant memory, and the best way to head off a recession - consumer spending accounts for two-thirds of U.S. economic activity - is to put some spending money back in the people's pockets...
...books on Greenspan give the subject little attention. In Maestro: Greenspan's Fed and the American Boom (Simon & Schuster; 270 pages; $25), author Bob Woodward briefly notes that for a while Greenspan claimed "impotence about the stock market while doggedly trying to influence it." Woodward comes back to the subject only briefly to conclude that Greenspan ultimately gave up on such a strategy because the market is just too unpredictable...
That's it. No serious discussion of whether adjusting interest rates to influence stock prices makes sense, whether it has ever really been tried, how it might work, what problems it presents or how Greenspan would or should approach...
...chief has said he does not target stock prices. But he has also said stock prices have a lot to do with inflation, which he targets daily. Justin Martin, author of Greenspan: The Man Behind Money (Perseus; 284 pages; $28), neatly points out that this is "a rather too fine distinction." But he spends even less time than Woodward probing the matter and then mysteriously concludes that such a strategy wouldn't work anyway. Millions of people have come to believe that Greenspan purposely moves stock prices. They're wrong, according to both authors. Yet we get no proof...