Cliff Taylor
speaker
1,456 appearances
11 recordings
2 series
first heard Apr 2026
last heard 3d ago
Cliff Taylor’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 11 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 3.
Appearances
But what was going on under the bonnet of this, I suppose, was malpractices taking place, particularly in relation to the market for mortgages to people who had relatively low incomes called subprime mortgages.
A lot of people were given loans which they should never
have been given on terms that they should never have been given them.
And in turn, those loans were bundled up and sold to investors who are left holding a pup, if you like, when the market collapsed.
So in the final years of Greenspan's term in the Fed, there was this huge risk being built up in the market.
Now, the price was only paid after his term was over, but he was called up before congressional committees enough
in detail about what happened.
I did admit that he made a mistake.
And I suppose to understand that, you need to understand that Greenspan's whole philosophy was free markets.
That was where he came from, if you like.
And that was also his blind spot, as it turned out.
So he reckoned that bank management, bank boards would ensure that they didn't put themselves at risk by doing things that were too risky.
But of course, as we now know, during the financial crisis,
That's exactly what happened in the US and, of course, exactly what happened in Ireland as well.
albeit that the story was slightly different here.
Yeah, it's interesting, all right.
And that point about productivity and technology is a very interesting one and very opposite in his case.
And I suppose he used it as an argument to keep interest rates lower than they would otherwise have been and was pretty much proven to be correct
more or less in that diagnosis, perhaps up to the end of his term when lower rates were criticized for creating a bit of a bubble.
And that is, I guess, an argument that's resonating around the markets again today with the whole AI thing in the markets.
Showing 821–840 of 1,456 · page 42 of 73
← Previous
Next →