Dimensions
155 x 235 x 16mm
'Bubble Man' tells the story of the great American stockmarket bubble, its bursting and the role of the man who made it all possible - Alan Greenspan.
In the second half of the 1990s, American stock-owners watched the value of their shares grow by $10 trillion. In the time since, more than $7 trillion of that has evaporated. By late 2002, mutual funds as a whole had lost every dollar of stockmarket gains since the great Wall Street run-up started in 1996. The newspaper cartoonist who sketched a middle-class man opening his quarterly 401K statement and finding it relabelled 4.01K was not exaggerating.
Curiously, though, polling in America shows that no one blames the one man most directly responsible. It apparently does not occur to them that it could be Alan Greenspan, the chairman of America's Federal Reserve Bank. The tale of how Alan Greenspan enabled the Great American Bubble, one of the biggest speculative frenzies in history, and yet manages to evade blame is an extraordinary and, as yet, untold story.
Peter Hartcher, newly-appointed political and international editor of 'The Sydney Morning Herald', provides a fascinating account of what has proved to be the most financially expensive event in American history. Along the way, serious questions are posed about the Federal Reserve and the prevailing orthodoxy on how national economies should be managed.
After the experience of Japan's bubble and America's, the management of asset price bubbles is the biggest headache for the managers of national economies, and Australia is absolutely in the headlights at the moment. It is not just a question of policy-makers - it bears directly on the value of everyone's properties.
