The hed above is straight from The New York Times article about how the Federal Reserve under Alan “Bubbles” Greenspan ignored the warning signs of the real estate bubble.

It’s a clever turn of phrase. Greenspan was an acolyte of Rand’s and what was likely his first publication in the Times was his defense of Atlas Shrugged against a brutal review of the work. He argued that it was actually a “celebration of life and happiness”.

While the authors of the article rarely write the headline, it is clearly an attempt to cast the failures of the Fed to deal with the problems in the credit markets generally, and the housing market specifically as a result of Greenspan’s Randroid ideas.

It clearly shows that Greenspan was never the genius that he was viewed as in, say, 2000.

To my mind, the high opinion that many people had of him was an artifact of low oil prices and the cooking of the books with regard to inflation figures.

Read the article. It’s a hoot.