-->Ich glaube 1927 gab es eine ähnliche Situation, als die Mitglieder des FOMC, die nicht aus New York kamen, eine Kreditverknappung wünschten, um die Aktienblase zu löschen. Die Reichsbank unter Hjalmar Schacht erhöhte in diesen Tagen die Zinsen und provozierte dadurch einen mittleren Krach an der Berliner Börse. Der Rest ist Geschichte.

MfG
El Sheik

By Steven Pearlstein
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, January 24, 2003; Page E01


It looked to many Americans like the best of economic times: Growth rates were the highest in a decade, with no sign of accelerating inflation. Unemployment was falling. Stock prices were climbing 20 percent a year.

But behind closed doors, back in 1997, a fierce battle was raging at the Federal Reserve Board over whether the central bank should use its interest rate powers to cool what many policymakers felt was an overheated economy and a speculative stock market, according to transcripts of the Fed's 1997 policy meetings, released yesterday.

The transcripts enhance Chairman Alan Greenspan's reputation as the master of the Fed's inside game. They show a chairman who marshals reams of statistics, flatters colleagues, dazzles them with new economic theories or warns ominously of public backlash -- whatever it takes to win a majority of the Fed's policymaking committee to his positions.

In many cases Greenspan bolstered his arguments with forecasts about the economy and stock market, prepared by his staff at the Fed, which failed to predict the strength and duration of the 1990s boom.

Each January the Fed releases verbatim transcripts of meetings the rate-setting Federal Open Market Committee held five years earlier.

At a decisive meeting in May 1997, Fed governor Laurence H. Meyer and nearly all of the Fed's regional bank presidents demanded that the Fed get"ahead of the curve" with the first of what they expected would be a series of rate hikes to slow the economy.

Cathy E. Minehan, president of the Boston Fed, warned that without some signal that the Fed was prepared to curtail speculation in stocks and real estate there would soon be a dangerous investment bubble.

"We need to reduce the risk of overshooting, and if we do not do it at a time of fast growth and tight labor markets, when will we do it?" she asked the other committee members.

But Greenspan, who at the previous meeting had all but promised the"inflation hawks" he could support a rate hike, surprised them by presenting a controversial new theory: that a dramatic rise in productivity stemming from technological advances would allow the economy to grow much faster than in the past without triggering inflation.

"Something quite fundamental is happening," Greenspan said, arguing that the committee hold off at least until the next meeting. When the votes were tallied, only one voting member of the committee decided to go public with his dissent by voting against Greenspan's motion to hold interest rates steady.

All through 1997, however, Greenspan made no bones about his feeling that stock prices were unjustifiably high, even with the surge in profits and productivity. As early as that February, when the Dow Jones industrial average was around 6800, he ridiculed the bullish predictions of Wall Street analyst Abby Joseph Cohen.

The following month, he joked that if high-tech growth continued at its present pace, the tech sector would grow to represent"120 percent of the economy."

By August, Greenspan was fretting out loud that his"new economy" theory had become so widely accepted that the public might turn against the Fed if and when it finally decided to put the brakes on the economy.

"The longer we are in a period where the economy remains exceptionally tight and price inflation continues to go down, the more difficult it will be for us to make a credible case for a [rate hike] around this table, let alone how we explain it to everyone else," he said.

It was not until the meeting of June 1999 that the Fed began raising rates, to the howls of investors who quickly blamed Greenspan for the stock market collapse that followed.

Transcripts of that meeting won't be released until January 2005.



© 2003 The Washington Post Company
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