Alan greenspan appeared at the National Press club in washington d. C. To discuss his book the map and the territory which looks at the past and the future of the Economic Forecasting and mismanagement. You can watch this hourlong program next on book tv. [applause] thank you, joe. Welcome everybody to the National Press club to our conversation tonight with dr. Greenspagreenspa n to talk about the map of the territory. This is not his first book. Its in fact the second one he has ridden since concluding eight and a half years as chairman of the Federal Reserve so we are honored to have you here tonight. Eight and a half years, eight and a half plus a decade. [laughter] [inaudible] he im sure. In addition to be of renowned economist dr. Greenspan was once an aspiring jazz musician and he is special to us here at the press club because he is the husband of Andrea Mitchell the National Press club just honored a couple of weeks ago with thereve Fourth Estate award for Lifetime Achievement in journalism so we are honored to have him in our audience for that and we are excited to have you back to it i also want to let our audience know that if you are tweeting tonight the hashtag is the the map and the territory so please go ahead and use that hashtag with abandon. Would you like to say a few words or should we go right into the discussion . Go right ahead. All right. Lets start by talking about the end of the book. You talk about a lot of concern with the political system that we have today and of course shortly after the book came out the Government Shutdown so you were quite prescience to forecast that quite well. What do you see coming next . Do you see any prospects for improvement in the political situation . If not, what are we in for . Well i think we first have to define what the problem is and it is not unique to the United States. We have seen this before in our history but the best way to define it is to recognize that Democratic Society such as ours more than 300 Million People in it, requires to function effectively in a civil manner certain sets of runcibles on which we all agree. And that turns out to be the bill of rights. Freedom of press, freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of religion and pretty much everybody agrees with that trait indeed the people who do not are not here or certainly are not here in a way in which we prefer they would, and behaved. So those are the fundamental beliefs and they are so sufficiently important that they are uncompromisable and its that fact which locks us altogether. The problem is that the rest of the decisionmaking which makes up i should say a civil government largely is made up of issues of compromise, and without compromise you will have no real fundamental rule of law. You will not have a society which can function. And so the issue here is, its not a pejorative term. Its an essential turn for society that wishes to function. And what we are finding is that there is too high a proportion of issues in the Public Domain which are becoming uncompromisable. And that means that the system will grind to a hault as it has indeed been showing it can do, when we have too much in that area and that cannot continue indefinitely. The issue really is novel to my experience and i have been in and out of washington since the late 1950s. And it has never been this way. The reason to start digging into the basis of it, you can see it in just our history. When i first arrived on the scene here, people were invited to dinners by people like joe allsop or Catherine Graham and those dinner parties were ritualistritualist ically 50 democrat and 50 republican. That continued on for quite a while and indeed most of the social gatherings were of that nature but most importantly everybody talk to each other. I remember for example i was in the Ford Administration white house and jerry ford would rail against tip oneills positions on many issues from 9 00 a. M. To 5 00 p. M. And tip would come right back with his fingers at old jerry ford. At 6 00 p. M. , tip would show up at the west wing of the white house to have a bourbon with his old buddy, jerry. That does not happen anymore. You find that the parties are 982 in a way and there is very little cross fertilization of ideas or a willingness to compromise and something has got to give. I dont know what it will be but i will tell you this, unless and until we do that we are going to have these types of crises which are showing up periodically. Right now the discussions with respect to what essentially is going to be the budget deal, we find out that everyone is thinking well we can do a little bit. What it needs is something our more broader. As i have always said this problem that we are dealing with today in the economy and the budget was essentially solved by simpsonbowles back several years ago. I recall very vividly saying when i saw that proposal, from a Bipartisan Group of people and was very rapidly accepted by the economic profession and all professionals, that this is terrific. We can all work from here. It never happened. The reason it never happened basically is we have this fundamental sort of rapture in our political system. So the question is how do we get back there . Pain for us the picture that we might see if we do keep having a series of showdowns. We only have a deal until early 2014 of course. What happens to the u. S. Economs if this becomes not the first shut down but one of many . Well, i think there is a little bit of misunderstanding. Initially remember there were continuing resolutions which essentially keeps the government going but there is a broad element of discretion and that and that never shuts down anything except a few divisions. You remember that the whole civilian pentagon and defense personnel were furloughed at the point of sequestration. So thats not the issue. And it wont be the issue. The issue is the debt ceiling. The debt ceiling is an anachronism from 1917. Few people what people dont realize is it actually was something to enhance expenditures, not to curtail it exist prior to world war i, every single appropriation had to be passed as law by both houses and signed by the president. The results of that is you had a physically impossible situation when we got into the war which was a very large buildup of the military. So the solution to that was to substitute a debt ceiling was limited the amount of expenditure and amount of debt that could be taken out and in so doing that what occurred was it got constructed into the system until today its particular version is a very peculiar definition of what the public debt is to essentially restricts spending. Its not an issue of restricting spending. Restricting borrowing to a certain amount and indeed you have the ceiling by definition and it is zero. That means that you have to get in todays market for example if you actually, the debt ceiling grabs hold, you have to cut spending by a significant amount or raise taxes. In order to meet the debt ceiling. And as you can well see there is not desirability on either side for that, so the congress is caught in a problem of arithmetic. That is an order to meet the debt ceiling you have got to cut spending or raise taxes and they choose separately to do neither. And so what happens is the president is required as the chief executive officer, and its never clear what the legal aspects of this are, to somehow pare expenditures which he can do, down to a level which meets the requirements. The problem here is people making the distinction between default on the debt and default on other government obligations, mainly entitlements. Forfeiture of the debt is a very dangerous sort of thing to do. That occurs when you cannot meet your Interest Payments or your payment of debt when do. But there will still be a huge amount of revenues coming in, even in the context of a balanced Budget Amendment so if the president wanted to segregate funds for paying interest, the issue of the bankruptcy of the government would go away. But that raises a lot of lyrical problems and of course you can then say yes, you are paying interest to the billionaires who are holding the Government Debt and you are depriving people who are too from getting their entitlement. That is an impossible political position to be in. If the law stays in place somebody has got to make that judgment and take the political heat. There are no winners in this sort of situation. The bottom line of all of this is the debt ceiling is an anachronism should not exist in and the reason it shouldnt exist is that the Congress Appropriates funds. We have the tax code. We can do a little arithmetic and determine what expenditures are going to be during the fiscal year and what taxes are going to be. We dont strain ourselves to subtract one from the other which tells us what they that change is and therefore you know exactly what the congress and the president signed into law essentially said as the level of the debt. Now its invariably a number higher in todays context then the ceiling that is implicit in the law. And so the problem here is you have contradictory legislation. The legislation is both houses of the congress and the president agree on a certain set of statistics. What the fiscal situation will be, and then nothing for their needs to be done because it has already passed. We are now taking the debt ceiling which says what you have just enacted is an invalid by an earlier law so you have contradictory legislation. This is the reason why the debt ceiling is creating such a problem that should never have existed. Or having existed it shouldve been repealed at the end of world war i. Speaking of in the political situation, what is your outlook for growth employment and inflation in 2014 . Well, as outlined in the book covers an awful lot of subjects. The political issues i have just discussed is one of them. The issue of the Economic Outlook is another and i have all sorts of other things. Fundamentally the thrust of this book is to say that the old consumptions which for example i and all professional economists of note believe that while human beings do behave irrationally, they basically do so in a random manner and therefore only rational decisions work their way through. In other words you cannot produce a steam engine by somebodys emotional intuition. Its a conception all issue which requires reason and you can basically demonstrated. All Economic Growth must fundamentally reflect actions that are rational. But it doesnt necessarily therefore follow that if that is true longterm, that people act being irrationally is irrelevani develop in the book, most of these things are fear, euphoria, and the like. They basically create a system of systematic relationships. People always respond. Individuals respond differently but with a threat to your say life and limb or your net worth, fear is the response that comes up. You cannot avoid that. How you handle it happens to be a different thing but what can be modeled as i describe in this book is how to put those types of problems into the econometrics, the data systems that we have in our models which actually had we done so anew what we were doing, which we didnt, would have told us we were having a big crisis coming up. We all knew that we had a bubble. Everybody knew it. Its an issue that nobody got. September the 15th, 2008 was the day the bubble would break. I would say virtually everybody in the financial world knew that there was a bubble there and it was going to burst but they were smart enough to get out before it got too big. The trouble is they all believed that they could move in minutes or hours ahead of everybody else but they didnt realize is they didnt have that much time. Everybody thought that they were going to get out which enabled the whole system to collapse instantaneously. And as i point out in the book, even though it did not create economic depression the way 1932 did, it was arguably the greatest financial crisis at the globe has ever known. Its the first time ever, while not the prices are assets went up as or gore down. The fact that markets shut down. They never shut down during the great depression. Prices went up and they went down but the markets were always open intentionally. Following september the 15th, those markets shut down. Credit disappeared and you could see votes backing up in the port of singapore because they couldnt pay their debts. You could see all sorts of things going on and crumbling. The type of crisis that we have never experienced. The last time that markets actually shut down was in 1907 for one day. This was a much broader issue and we responded to it as if it was necessary to do so. And i think we dont know for certain, but i think those actions stabilized. I know tarp was considerably a political disaster. It wasnt. It was an essential action taken by the government to substitute sovereign credit for what was the disappearance of and the results of this was that we got into a situation where government activism in my judgment became we tried to do everything. Every time there was a little thing going wrong we took action and i think the evidence is becoming increasingly conclusive to show that those actions by creating uncertainties in the marketplace ,com,com ma especiallespeciall y for the investment in capital goods, were sufficient to suppress the level of Economic Activity because as i very well remember the cousin was part of my job before i went into government, was looking at Capital Expenditure appropriations projects and companies. And the one thing that we were always acutely aware of is that it wasnt so much the forecast a profit in the usual statistics. It was the issue of uncertainty that was critical. And it turns out that the degree of uncertainty as i measure in the book became extraordinarily high especially for very longterm investments. And they collapse. Housing collapsed. Nonresidential buildings collapsed. All sorts of lives, all sorts of assets that we produced in the gdp which had a Life Expectancy of more than 20 years fell by 50 and have only gradually recovered now. But thats 50 of essentially 8 of the longterm assets was four percentage points. That is the unemployment rate. That is what created the problem and to this day we havent cured it. The uncertainty is still a major overhang and suppressing activity. Now there are some signs and i dont want to get too complex but we have one important issue which is very fortunate. Because of the collapse in 2008, the stock crisis cell very sharply and stay down for quite a long period of time. And because the longterm uptrend in stock crisis, as i go into the book and explained, is about 7 a year. So that means that even though we have reached stock prices have come back to where they were and say october 2007, which was the peak, we just lost five years of trend growth. The effect of which is by all objective measures stop prices are actually quite low by historic standards and the pressure has continued to move up. That is important because even with the uncertainty that is built into that, the prices are still suppressed and as far as i can judge at this particular stage, its the only thing that is keeping the economy going at this point, because i then go on to demonstrate how assets, asset prices are far more indicators than finance. They have a major impact on real Economic Activity, employment and the like and the uncertainties that have been engendered as a consequence in the aftermath of the crisis and the very considerable activism which incidentally has created a major uncertainty especially of the deficit, are with the tax rates are going to be in the far distant future. If you dont know what tax rates are on capital projects, which you are in the process of discussing to implement, that project is going nowhere and indeed that is what is happening ,com,com ma or has happened. So the problem is when you ask what is the outlook, and this is a very long answer to a very short question, its going to did 10 very critically on whether the degree uncertainty can be brought down. I think there are some signs that its happening but the presumption that thing is going to come back very fast i think is unrealistic. Fortunately, we have asset prices would still have a way to move up. Housing prices of course that moved up quite significantly and they are still moving. Remember the singlefamily Housing Starts have come back a great deal but they are still only one third of where they were at the top. You can do the same thing by going project by project in a Business Investment area. I have a specific ratio which i use which is very useful, which is the ratio of what private Business Capital investment is to liquid cash flow. Or more specifically, illiquid fixed Asset Investment to liquid cash flow. The extent to which businesses are willing to take that liquid asset and put it into as such assets which they cant sell tells you how comfortable with that number they are. That number until recently was at the lowest number until 1938 which is a measure of how severe the issue of uncertainty has been and its only since come up a little bit so that we still have a way to go and im not exactly overly optimistic about where we are going. I dont think i would be surprised if we fell into another deep recession but its hard to see either the United States or indeed the rest of the world moving in any major recoveries which will bring us back to the pre2000 a crisis level. You took us through a bit of the history there, going back to the end of your term as fed chairman, knowing what you know now five years later, is there anything you would have done differently . Well, yeah if we had omniscience that would have been terrific. First of all let me just say that the issue of bubbles are a function of human nature. We will never prevent them but the irony to the central banker andy will find many such comments in the transcripts of the federal open Market Committee which is i think very sensibly issued only 55 years afterthefact afterthefact, but there is also some discussion that theyre in which we are all talking about bubbles but no one is saying anything publicly because they are afraid it will cause problems. The main issue about bubbles is that a necessary condition is that the economy is behaving very well. That inflation is suppressed, that Interest Rates are modest. There is no evidence of instability. Those conditions are the necessary and i would say sufficient conditions for a bubble emerging. It happens 100 of the times. But most bubbles when they break do not have significant economic impact. We had a big bubble break and remember, i remember october 19, 1987. The Dow Jones Industrial average went down 22 in one day. It had never even gotten remotely close to such a crash. The economy which i thought was going to be in real trouble if we didnt resolve this quickly basically shows in retrospect almost no signs of weakness there. Then again in the socalled dot. Com boom from 1993 to the year 2000, that was a Big Stock Market boom. It blew out in the year 2000. The markets crashed. There were huge capital losses by individuals and investors and the like. The effect on Economic Activity was virtually zero. And the reason essentially as i explain in the book, is a necessary condition for a crisis bubble is that those who hold the socalled toxic assets in the dot. Com boom it was stock, are holding it on debt or leverage. Because the real problem of the financial crisis is and i must say fundamentally the crisis of all economic cycles is contagion of defaulters. Most specifically, its bank defaults. So if you dont have to fault by banks or others, there is no contagion. Contagion incidentally is sort of the domino effect of one person going bankrupt, bankrupting somebody to heed owes money etc. And you have that domino effect. That is Critical Condition that is required to get the type of crisis that happened in 2008, 1929, 1907. Those things happened basically because there is debt there. And so if you go back and ask, well what could we have done differently . The question is, could we have stopped the rise in the debt which we knew was happening. Its covered or not the data. The question is how. And if you have legislation that says you have to lend, remember that there is a huge amount of legislation which preceded the crisis which we called the Affordable Housing act. And as i point out and you can see its politically unacceptable to a very large and substantial part of society that it was regulations by hud which required fannie and freddie to hold a very significant amount of their total assets in Affordable Housing loans. And the only way they could do that was to basically buy it wholesale which meant what we could call securitized subprime loans and without getting into detail which i do it into and documented the book, there was a move in the market and in 2003 and 2002 and 2003, they picked up half of the net new issuance of sub prime securities and because they had to have actual home mortgages behind them in order for people who wanted to sell those securities to fannie and freddie, those Brokerage Firms in turn had to get actual mortgages to get under the socalled securitized banner or securitized loan, the funding for the securitized loans. The problem with that is that these sub prime mortgages which were actually i think quite safe in the early years, they had fixed rates. They had somewhat higher Interest Rates, but their very nature was they were issued to people who could not afford the 20 down payment but could afford the Monthly Payments. What the hud regulation enforced or force the Financial Community to do was to create a whole new set of subprime mortgages but by definition you couldnt change the down payment. You could only change the Monthly Payment and the only way to do that was to go to adjustablerate loans. Low and the hold, if you look at the data the Bank Association a proportion of adjustablerate mortgages and i think it was 2003 and 2004 went straight up. And within a very short reed of time we found a goodly number of those couldnt make their first payment and that is what set the whole thing off and created a boom which i dont care what type of Monetary Policy you have, you are not going to prevent that from creating ultimately the problems in which it did. So could we have done Something Differently or more exactly could the regulators have done Something Different . The only thing we could have done differently which we werent able to do for the reason im telling you, which i argue for now, to have a lot more capital and the banks. The problem unfortunately is in 2006, the federal deposit insurance corp. Essentially speaking for all the regulators, the Federal Reserve and the fdic and others, said that more than 99 of american banks were highly capitalized at the highest of standards. It would have been very difficult to get any form of legislation through that would have raised the Capital Requirements. And so the problem basically is as we are sitting there as a central bank knowing that we have just been in 2005 in and 2006 a period of extraordinary stability and the euphoria is starting to build because its not altogether crazy to believe this long period of stability, that the next six months are going to be stable. In other words its not craziness. The problem unfortunately is how it happens is that the system not only breaks down the necessary condition for when it breaks down is that nobody expects it to happen. There were an awful lot of people who were out there saying no, we forecast where they forecast what everybody forecast. We were in a bubble and it was going to break. I know of nobody who got september 15, 2008. As i go in the book i explain why that happened that way. I argue that if people anticipated it would not have happened and indeed a real problem that we were supposed to get involved with was his socalled current account deficit or lending to foreigners. And everyone became aware that was the next crisis of the Exchange Rate for the euro and the dollar turned in such a manner and so rapidly that all those imbalances disappeared and the one thing that didnt cause the crisis was the socalled current account deficit. But what did was fundamentally unfair castable. Is there anything that we in the federer the comptroller or other regulars could have done . The answer is nothing that i could see unless we had the capability as i hope you will have in the immediate future of making a major increase in Capital Requirements for banks. Going from the past two looking forward can you give us your assessment of janet yellen as the next fed chairman and what would it mean to have the first woman in a position . Ism the way you put the question that those are not two separate issues. Its the same person. All in one. I worked with janet yellen for a number of years and remember she was on the Federal Reserve board when i was there. Then she subsequently became president of San FranciscoFederal Reserve bank and when she wasnt at the Board Meeting she was at the federal Market Committee meetings. She is an extraordinarily good economists. She had found was very helpful to me because she was a professional academic and a very significant insights into where various different theories were coming up and the like in academia. I mean i obviously have had an awful lot of education and i did actually teach school for a while but i was essentially a private economist in my early years for a long period of time. There were a lot of theories that have been developed and they never had time to watch them which i never really followed very closely and i didnt quite understand them. I used to go to janet and asked her come explain this to me. She was terribly helpful. I can imagine it would be otherwise, but she is going to have a very tough set of problems and i think she knows it going forward. And what about the fact is she would be the first woman . Is that important . I made a Public Statement that its extraordinary and wonderful to have a woman finally in that particular job which has been an allmale line going back as far as you can go back to 1913, 14. But, that to me is [inaudible] my wife certainly would agree with that. [laughter] we are here at the National Press club so give us your assessment of the Media Coverage of the crisis. Obviously the journalist didnt all see it coming either. What was the role that the media played in covering the developments before and since 2008 and what did the media miss . Well sitting at the National Press club and criticizing the press. Can constructive criticism. Its difficult to say because everybody at the same problem. It wasnt an issue of whether or not you are terrific econometrician and you can do these big model structures with all sorts of very fancy mathematics, which i dont think any person i know in the press corps per se essay and it did indicated in the book what we were dealing with was human nature. And i know this is a very radical statement, but press people are knowledgeable about human nature because they are human beings and in any event the issue here is very importane interest actively aware whether it press corps or economists or bankers, we all sensed the same issues of euphoria, fear and it doesnt require an expertise and maybe perhaps a little bit in psychology but i think that the press corps on this issue as i say the same level as the most highlyskilled economic technicians. Some of them are poor in some of them are better than others but in general i have never had a problem seeing that the press was missed the real issues. Some are not reporters. Some are commentators. That is a Different Group but for those in the press corps who endeavor to be objective enough to have political biases, i think they did an extraordinarily good job in general and i think its largely because there is an attempt to say what is really happening is policymakers would like you to believe is happening. We talk at the beginning about the polarization of congress. You just mentioned the rise of opinion oriented media. Do you think that plays any role in the partisanship that we see in congress and turning to the bigger picture, the problems we talked about . Well, partisanship is something which has always existed. In the book i have certain charts which i take for example the 2010 congress and the four caucuses, democrat, Republican House and senate and all four at the same time, they all go up and down with the center of it being for example in the Republican Party those on the far right on the tail end of the middle of the caucus is just medium conservative and then it goes down and the actual bridge between republicans and democrats is virtually nonexistent. There are members of either the house or the senate which are really in the middle and they never have been. Because i go back and i pick up for example the four caucuses in 1900, maybe the 1996 congress. It looks the same way and that difference essentially now is not that there is more partisanship. There are differences but they are pretty much the same if you just look at the data. The thing that bothers me is that is not what the issue is. Its the issue of getting together and recognizing that there are fundamental values which we all have which are indeed uncompromisable and nobody requests us to compromise the problem is as i mentioned at the very beginning that there is much too much in the way of Public Policy which should be subject to compromise, indeed must be subject to compromise if we are going to get a viable form of laws in which 300 Million People can civilly live. You are of course still actively working, still forecasting, still modeling. What are we missing now . What are you seeing that leave the rest of us might not be seeing at . There is a book that came out a week or so ago that explains all of that in detail. A lot of people have just bought the book and hopefully they been listening to you and will read the book. Can you give a little synopsis of looking forward there . Well, as i said the fundamental issue of, what came up in which i looked in the mirror one morning and said how in the world did we all miss this so badly, and i went through not only the fed models didnt work and the imf models didnt work. Jpmorgan was forecasting that the American Economy be able Global Economy is going to be rising during the second half of 2009. It obviously didnt. And so it wasnt an issue of some gas and some know. I do not know of a single standard economic model that captured the actual point in which the bubble would break. So i said what is it that failed here . The book is essentially a detective story. I go through and i go stepbystep, starting with the presumption that i like everybody else assumed that human irrationality while significant was essentially random and therefore could be disregarded. I then went on to start to ask the question, is that statement true . I gradually proved to myself that the views that i held earlier were just wrong and its an interesting experience to look in the mirror and say you were wrong. But i was and indeed so were all of my other colleagues who did the same thing. And so the question was, can we integrate what is a relatively new part of economics called behavioral economists which doesnt build on the economic model but does point out that there are a lot of, not inconsistencies but very significant differences in the way people behave in the real world. Then the way the model is developing. Then there was the point that caught me. Most eakin econometric models and most economic models generally are all based on probability distributions and issues of how chance and the whole issue of gambling gets surprisingly analytical and to economics and developing a lot of our statistical data in what they do. One of the things that became very obvious to me and struck me is when i realized that the socalled probability distribution of economic outcomes are supposed to occur and that the sickly is standard going all the way back. That they were wrong and the one example that i thought struck me and i think everybody will recognize this, you go into the Physicians Office and you are about to have a procedure and you asked them what is the probability that something could go wrong . And he says we have extraordinarily large amount of data on this exact question. He says the probability that something could go wrong is one in 10,000. You walk out the door of the Doctors Office and it feels like 50 50. There is no way you can avoid that sort of bias but when you take that bias and put it into economic terms, you get with whats, few may understand in what people have been calling the fat tail which is a very extraordinary distortion of how what probabilities are of how people respond to events and they do not respond in a sense that everything is random. They respond in a systematic way. This book endeavors to define those various aspects and while i dont actually construct a full model in some considerable way i do outline basically what is involved and i go through things like, i have a chapter on stockmarket forecasting and i applied these principles to the way markets behave, stock phrases behave. Part of it is developed from my own experiences. Before i got into government, i decided at one point i wanted to do trading in commodities so i bought a seat on the exchange and i traded. I have my office right next door and i would go to the opening and sort of bid and scream at everybody around the ring, and i would go back to the office at the end of lunch and then at the close. I thought i knew a great deal about the way copper prices and zinc prices were being traded and i knew a great deal about how they worked. I found that i made a reasonably good amount of profit when i traded as an outside customer using a brokerage firm, away from the floor. At the end of three months as a member of the exchange i made zero, and ive realized in retrospect that with those people around the ring knew that i didnt is human nature. How people react and they can spot when somebody is overly anxious to sell which is exactly the time you want to buy from them. Well, i wouldnt say i got fleeced but it was an experience that induced me to sell my seat right away and go back to doing something which i knew something about which is what i did. But that was really the first time i became aware that there was something very unusual about how we behave. The trouble is its takes an awfully long time to penetrate. But as i said, im not there yet. Im still this morning i wrote a lot of copy for a potential oped piece im going to write and so you get into the type of position i am in once you start to think about something. I find i have the same degree of curiosity that i had as a 6yearold. I love it. I mean its a fascinating experience and i try to make it, leaving all of the heavy statistics behind it i say very specifically that ive written in narrative in a way which doesnt require an understanding of a lot of econometrics but its in there because a lot of the conclusions i come to our politically controversial. The question is not what your ideology is. Ideology is a useless abstraction. What are the facts . And what is this syllogism you are using . And if i for example am wrong about a particular position im taking, i in the appendix require that people say whether fact is wrong or you are jumping or logically from a to the mac and its fall so i actually lay out the exact process by which i quote move certain issues or at least say they are highly probable but id leave that out of the narrative and just try to do the narrative as best i can. Most anybody who has any interest in our political economy could understand it. We are almost out of time but before we wrap up one last question. Tell us what is next for alan greenspan. You have just blown up all of your assumptions from decades past. You are 87 years young and still obviously working hard, like you said thinking about new things every day. Going back to commodities trading . Something else . I dont feel a day over 85. [laughter] its hard to tell. I am sufficiently a statistician no, i will not live to 175 so somewhere between now and then, it will come to an end but i presume at that point i will still be trying to solve equations and let somebody else take over from there. Thank you. Thank you so much for being our guest tonight. Lets give him a hand. [applause] why would you trust them . Look at their track record. This is not a question of trust. This is a question of finding a way to stop them from doing that one way to stop that is to get rid of all the enrichment