today

Former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, for years an inscrutable seer on the economy, is causing a stir by alleging in his new memoir that "the Iraq war is largely about oil." He says : "I'm saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows".

Mr Greenspan has become the "highest official in American government at the time" of the Iraq conflict to publicly accuse the president, George Bush, of going to war over oil.

IMO: Bush is a war criminal and it could help matters if he and most of his administration were judicially convicted and hung. Bush is supposed to be a good Christian - can't he volunteer for execution for war crimes ? Better than eternal damnation, surely ?

Interestingly, Greenspan praised the UK government for continuing the economic approach of Margaret Thatcher.

Greenspan, a lifelong Republican, writes that he advised the White House to veto some bills to curb "out-of-control" spending while the Republicans controlled Congress. According to The Wall Street Journal, he says that Bush's failure to do so "was a major mistake." Republicans in Congress, he writes, "swapped principle for power. They ended up with neither." "They deserved to lose" in the 2006 elections when the Democrats retook control of Congress, he adds.

The former Fed chief said the fall in US housing prices triggered by the subprime credit crisis would be very large. The drop in property prices "is going to be larger than most people expect," Greenspan told the Financial Times, adding that he would not be surprised if the percentage decline in the United States ended up being "in double digits."

IMO: Yes, and the world will end in most of our lifetimes due to global warming if human beings everywhere continue to show so much personal greed, ignorance and stupidity. It is particularly the developed countries and China who are presently to blame - possibly through circumstances.