The Oil Drum

http://themessthatgreenspanmade.blogspot.com/2006/10/not-sustainable.html

Quoting Dr. Kurt Richebacher. "At around 80 years old, he still knows how to blast a Federal Reserve Chairman and, having been around so long and having seen so much, he takes great issue with what he's witnessed in the U.S. economy in the last couple decades."

Has Mr. Greenspan ever realized that he has turned the U.S. economy into a bubble economy? Who else among former and present policymakers and top economists on Wall Street has realized this? Some certainly have. In Japan, even policymakers frankly used this word in public. But in America, everybody painstakingly avoids this admission.

In order to eschew mentioning the dirty word, a new definition has come into general use. U.S. economic growth is neither "bubble driven" nor "debt driven"; it is "asset driven." It is a term especially invented for the American public to convey the good feeling that the U.S. economy is creating assets, while in reality, with its consumer borrowing-and-spending binge, it is consuming its capital, reflected in falling investment and soaring foreign indebtedness.