Alan Greenspan’s new book, The Age of Turbulence, published earlier this month, contains these quotes: “The eventual dominance of the Republicans in southern state politics brought the two major parties to numerical parity but, in the process, induced an ideological divide between conservative Republicans and liberal Democrats. It has left a vast untended center from which a viable, well-financed independent presidential candidate could conceivably emerge in 2008, or, if not then, in 2012.”
Also, “I often wonder if a ticket of a Republican for president and a Democrat for vice-president, or the reverse, would attract the vast untended center. Perhaps this issue wouldn’t matter if the world were at peace…but that has not been the case since 9/11. Who holds the reins of government matters.”
Alan Greenspan can play politics just as much as any Republican or Democrat. In order to keep getting reelected to his post, he continually kept us in “prosperity” (fueled by mountains of both public and private debt) by keeping interest rates low in order to create that debt, by continually propping up the stock market, bailing out hedge funds putting taxpayer money at risk and reimbursing rich depositors for more than the FDIC limit called for. All of this created two bubbles (the stock market bubble and now the housing bubble) as well as to eliminate the threat of risk in the marketplace. After all, why worry about making bad investments when Uncle Alan will come and bail us out? Oh well, at least it got him continually reelected to his Federal Reserve post.
For a few years now, I have been saying that the Republican Party will be a minority-size party by the year 2012. I still believe that to be the case.
Hello Guru, what enticed you to post an article. This article was extremely interesting, especially since I was searching for thoughts on this subject last Thursday.