Mobbing the owl
EVEN Alan Greenspan's stock is not all it was. The wise owl of the Federal Reserve has lost a feather or two. He got mobbed when the Fed intervened to stave off the collapse of Long Term Capital Manage- ment, the hypertrophied hedge fund which was not everyone's idea of a deserving cause. He says he was staving off a general collapse of the markets in credit, and that the Fed merely lent its good offices — though when the Bank of England does that, it locks the offices' door from the out- side and puts the key in its pocket. His admirers are disappointed to find that he cannot rescue Goldilocks, for the American economy will brush against recession next year and there is not much he can do about it. They did themselves no favours by assuming that so long as he was there, everything would be all right, and he might usefully have disillusioned them. Events will now do that for him.
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