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Hier ein interessanter Artikel von Northern Trust:
<font size="4">Clinton The Cause Of Enron Fiasco? Get Over It, Wall Street Journal</font>
January 14, 2002
Some kooks blame global warning for everything bad that happens. The Wall Street Journal blames Bill Clinton. To wit its lead editorial ends with:"Rather, the ultimate lesson may turn out to be that Enron was able to play fast and loose in a financial boom and Clintonian moral climate, and was called to account in a recession when the moral climate has turned Ashcroftian."
Well, The Journal got it part right. Bill Clinton did renominate Alan Greenspan as chairman of the Federal Reserve Board. Don't forget, though, a Republican-majority Senate confirmed him. Why does this kook bring up the name of Alan Greenspan in conjunction with Enron? Read today's Journal article on page C1,"How Wall Street Greased Enron's Money Machine." This article tells us about Enron's"voracious appetite for capital," and how Wall Street ccommodated it. It tells us about all of the over-the-counter derivative contracts Enron pioneered and about all of the activities in derivatives in which Wall Street participated in order to finance Enron.
What does this have to do with Alan Greenspan? For starters, Alan Greenspan was a champion of this"financial engineering." He sees it as an extension of his"new economy" delusion. Alan Greenspan does not seem to understand that derivatives do not reduce risk, but only shift risk - sometimes to those who do not have the capital warranting them to bear that risk. Enron is a perfect example of all of this. Financial engineering got debt off of Enron's balance sheet, but it put that debt on the balance sheets of partnerships that were de facto subsidiaries of Enron. All of this financial engineering implies increased intermediation by financial institutions. And increased financial intermediation implies increased borrowing by the financial sector. Chart 1 shows that starting in the early 1990s, a period when Greenspan was at the Fed's helm, a"paradigm shift" took place in that financial sector borrowing took off relative to nonfinancial sector borrowing. Through about 1990, financial sector borrowing never got to 50% of nonfinancial sector borrowing. But in the decade of the 1990s, financial sector borrowing worked its way up to over 100% of nonfinancial sector borrowing. This increased pace of financial sector borrowing suggests that leverage in the financial sector was rising rapidly. The data in Chart come from the Fed's flow-of-funds report. Doesn't Alan Greenspan look at the numbers his own"shop" produces?
Chart 1:
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Now, I submit that this financial sector credit/derivatives orgy of the late 1990s could not have taken place without the tacit blessing of Alan Greenspan. The evidence for this is presented in Chart 2. Plotted in this chart is what this neo-Austrian calls"created" credit. It is credit created by depository institutions (commercial banks, thrifts, and money market mutual funds) that could not have been done so without the Fed providing the"seed" money. Created credit is very much akin to counterfeit money. How does it get created? Suppose that there is an increase in the demand for credit. All else the same, this would put upward pressure on the structure of interest rates. But Alan Greenspan sets the level of one interest rate - the overnight cost of funds, or the fed funds rate. With the increased demand from credit, how can Greenspan prevent the funds rate from rising? By creating more dollar reserves in the financial system at the keystroke of a computer. This creation of credit means that no one need cut back on his/her/its spending. The creation of credit creates new spending power, which increases the demand for goods, services, and assets. An increase in the M3 money supply, the bulk of depository institutions' liabilities, is the byproduct of this created credit. In contrast, private sector saving does not create new spending power, rather it just transfers it from savers to borrowers. A saver is willing to forgo current spending in favor of increased future spending. The interest rate agreed on between borrower and lender (saver) is the inducement to forgo current spending. Chart 2 shows that created credit, implicitly created by Alan Greenspan, became an ever-increasing proportion of saving (transfer credit) starting in the mid 1990s. By the end of the 1990s, created credit as a proportion of transfer credit was the highest in over 40 years. <br />
Chart 2<br />
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You want to blame someone for the stock market bubble of the 1990s and the Enron debacle? Don't blame Bill Clinton. Blame Alan Greenspan.
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