Alan Greenspan, the Ayn Rand-besotted architect of the global financial meltdown, has a curious way of ignoring history.
In the Financial Times this week, he attacked Obama's financial reforms. "The act may create the largest regulatory-induced market distortion since America's ill-fated imposition of wage and price controls in 1971,'' he wrote.
Of course, Greenspan neglects to tell us that he was the one who created the "largest regulatory-induced market distortion" by scrapping all the rules that had governed the market and that had stopped it running out of control. In Greenspan's perverse view, markets are just about supply and demand, and governments have no right to put up fences. Let's forget about the rapacious greed of the banking sector and investors who couldn't get enough.
And of course, the only thing that stopped the global economy from collapsing completely was the trillions of dollars poured in with bailout funds. That money came from governments, not the market.
Greenspan's comments are beneath contempt. As Floyd Norris writes in the New York Times: "It reminds me of a defense lawyer arguing that while his client may have committed a few murders on one particular day, his conduct on all the other days of his life had been exemplary.
Unfortunately, Greenspan has reverted back to Oracle mode and Greenspanism is starting to resurface. Witness JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon claiming this week that the badly needed financial reforms will "damage America".
The big worry is that the spirit of Greenspan is still out there in the market.
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