번역가 김홍식 의 블로그 입니다 : [ 발췌 : Interview with ] Alan Greenspan ( 2007 ) 
 [ 발췌 : Interview with ] Alan Greenspan ( 2007 ) 
 출처 : NBC News ( Sunday , September 23 , 2007 ) 
 Moderator : Tim Russert 
 자료 1 : http : / / online . wsj . com / public / resources / documents / meethepress 070923 . pdf 
 자료 2 : http : / / votesmart . org / public - statement / 291576 / nbc - meet - the - press - transcript #. UWNdPoFNWF 8 
 MR . RUSSERT : Let me pick up on some interviews that you ' ve given this week as you ' ve been touring , talking about your book , " The Age of Turbulence . " You said this : “ I think Bill Clinton was the best Republican president we ' ve had in a while . ” Republican ? 
 MR . GREENSPAN : I ' m sure he doesn ' t like that joke , but if you look at his record compared to what I think appropriate policy ought to be , he ' s for free trade , he ' s for globalization , he was for welfare reform , fiscal restraint and -- true enough , he ' s not a Republican . I ' m sorry , President Clinton , I didn ' t mean to say that . But I must say , I had to follow an awful lot of your particular guidelines and found them very compatible with my own . 
 MR . RUSSERT : He did raise taxes . 
 MR . GREENSPAN : He did raise taxes , and I must say I could have done without that . But , look , democracies are compromise , and you do what you can so that the majority of the people support you . 
 MR . RUSSERT : You also said this : " The Bill Clinton administration was a pretty centrist party . But they ' re not governing again . The next administration may have the Clinton administration name but the Democratic Party has moved very significantly in the wrong direction . " Hillary Clinton ' s party is not Bill Clinton ' s party ? 
 MR . GREENSPAN : All I can say is that they ' re taking positions which he , as president , veered away from . 
 MR . RUSSERT : Such as ? 
 MR . GREENSPAN : Whole area of trade , for example , which is a very critical issue because it ' s not only the issue of trade , it refers to the globalization and how one views what is the driving force in this world which creates prosperity . 
 MR . RUSSERT : When the book first came out , The Washington Post ' s Bob Woodward wrote the story , a front page story , and this is how he characterized it : " Alan Greenspan , who served as Federal Reserve chairman for 18 years and was the leading Republican economist for the past three decades , levels unusually harsh criticism at President Bush and the Republican Party in his new book , arguing that Bush abandoned the central conservative principle of fiscal restraint . 
 " He expresses deep disappointment with Bush . ` My biggest frustration remained the president ' s unwillingness to wield his veto against out - of - control spending . Not exercising the veto power became a hallmark of the Bush presidency . To my mind , Bush ' s collaborate - don ' t - confront approach was a major mistake . The Republicans in Congress lost their way . They swapped principle for power . They ended up with neither . '" 
 Which bill should the president have vetoed ? 
 MR . GREENSPAN : A whole series of them . First of all , let me just say that remember that if failure to veto is a problem , the real problem are the bills that should be vetoed . My major concern was not with the administration , but what I saw was a deteriorating position with respect to policy on the part of the Congress when both Houses were under Republican rule . And it ' s that which I found to be extraordinarily debilitating to the outlook . I basically think that the president ' s failure to veto to try to collaborate and to try to find ways to get compromises on bills , in retrospect , didn ' t work . And I think the consequence is that , effectively , the Republican Party lost its way . 
 MR . RUSSERT : The issue of tax cuts is front and center in your book and has been the topic of debate in Washington this week . You write candidly that Senator Kent Conrad , Democrat from North Dakota , Robert Rubin , then President Clinton ' s economic adviser , came to you and said , " If you testify before the Senate and embrace the Bush tax cut plan , it ' s going to open up the floodgates and it ' s going to encourage people to give big tax cuts . " And that ' s exactly what happened , you say , much to your consternation , that you didn ' t specifically endorse the plan . A frequent critic of yours , Paul Krugman , has weighed in on in this , and this is the way he describes it , and I want to give you a chance to talk about it . 
 " When President Bush first took office , it seemed unlikely that he would succeed in getting his proposed tax cuts enacted . 
 " Then Alan Greenspan , the chairman of the Federal Reserve , testified before the Senate Budget Committee . Suddenly , his greatest concern , the ` emerging key fiscal policy need , ' he told Congress , was to avert the threat that the federal government might actually pay off " " its debt . To avoid this awful outcome , he advocated tax cuts . " " The floodgates were opened . 
 " And Mr . Greenspan has just published a book in which he castigates the Bush administration for its fiscal irresponsibility . Well , I ' m sorry , but that criticism comes six years late and a trillion dollars short . 
 " If anyone had doubts about Mr . Greenspan ' s determination not to inconvenience the Bush administration , those doubts were resolved two years later when the administration proposed another round of tax cuts even though the budget was now deep in deficit . And guess what ? The former high priest of fiscal responsibility did not object . And in 2004 he expressed support for making the Bush tax cuts permanent -- remember , " those " are the tax cuts he now says he didn ' t endorse . " 
 MR . GREENSPAN : There are so many questions to -- that raises , that I ' ll try to get them -- try to give you short answers . First of all , the notion that I was extraordinarily powerful and my word carried great weight is not in evidence on such issues as Medicare where I , for years , have raised alarms about the size of the problems . My views were wholly disregarded . I could give you a long list of things in which I had strong views , nothing happened . So all of a sudden , I become this powerful force in moving tax policy . 
 Now , there ' s a fascinating problem . The 2001 tax cut was a very unusual tax cut in the sense that it confronted , for the first time in 150 years , the possibility that we would actually eliminate the debt in the United States . And it was that concern which creates major problems with respect to accumulating assets . When you have $ 500 billion surpluses , when the debt is effectively zero , creates huge holdings of private assets by the federal government , and for reasons I express in the book , I think that ' s very bad idea , and I must say , Bill Clinton agreed with me on that issue . 
 MR . RUSSERT : Do you believe either political party has stepped up to the crisis we face with Social Security and Medicare in the coming years ? 
 MR . GREENSPAN : I do not . 
 MR . RUSSERT : How big a crisis will that be ? 
 MR . GREENSPAN : Social Security is not a big crisis . We ' re approximately 2 percentage points of payroll short over the very long run . It ' s a significant closing of the gap , but it ' s doable , and doable in any number of ways . Medicare is a wholly different issue because , remember , right now , with the current entitlement , we can afford Medicare . It ' s easily refunded . We ' re going to double the size of the retired population . And by all of the analysis I go through in the book , it ' s very evident to me that we are not able to actually deliver on the Medicare we are promising , and I think that is marginally unethical to immoral because we are promising to people who have not yet retired a fairly significant Medicare package which , if they knew they weren ' t going to fully get , they would take actions now -- maybe retire later , do different things -- and I think everybody has been avoiding this issue . We avoided it in the Social Security Commission in 1983 , and everyone ' s done -- been doing it since . Then it was more than 20 years before . We ' re now right at the point where if we don ' t act we ' re going to be in very serious problem -- trouble . 
 MR . RUSSERT : You mentioned housing . There ' s been a lot of debate about your role with the so - called housing bubble , your whole role in terms of subprime interest rates for housing . This is how Conde Nast , the -- Portfolio , wrote about it , John Cassidy . He said this : " In 2004 , as the subprime boom was cranking up , Greenspan advised homeowners to switch from fixed - rate mortgages to adjustable - rate loans . " " April " of " 2005 " at " a speech that probably now haunts him , he said , ` Innovation has brought about a multitude of new products , such as subprime loans and niche credit programs for immigrants . Such developments are representative of the market responses that have driven the financial services industry throughout the history of our country . Where , once , more - marginal applicants would simply have been denied credit , lenders are now able to quite efficiently judge the risks posed by individual applicants and to price that risk appropriately . '" Are you responsible for this bursting of the housing bubble ? 
 MR . GREENSPAN : No . Shall I explain ? First of all , I did make a speech in February of 2004 
 in which I explained a fairly interesting analysis by the Federal Reserve staff which said that there were a lot of , a lot of home buyers who would do far better were they to take adjustable - rate mortgages , because they weren ' t going to live in the home long enough and the price they were paying to get the fixed - rate mortgage was exceptionally high . Now this , incidentally , was not subprime , this was prime adjustable rates . A week later I shows up -- show up at the Economic Club of New York , and , with a thousand people asking me all sorts of questions -- I shouldn ' t put a thousand , a thousand people there and a couple people asking me questions , the question that came up right at the top , " Are you , in this -- in this day , disparaging the 30 - year mortgage ? " Because the issue was that vs . adjustable rate . And I said , " No , on the contrary . When I take out a mortgage , I take out a 30 - year fixed - rate mortgage . " I was referring to a special , small category of people . But it had nothing to do with subprime . 
 But with the whole housing boom , we ' re dealing with a world problem . More than two dozen , two dozen nations are experiencing exactly what we are experiencing . In fact , our housing price boom is less than the average , and this is very clear -- this very clearly calls for a global explanation , not for an individual explanation of what central banks do . And , indeed , central banks around the world have largely lost their power to affect long - term mortgage rates because it ' s global forces which are pushing it , and we proved it . We tried to raise the rate in 2004 and we failed . We tried again in 2005 and we failed . And so it ' s very clear to me that central banks , ourselves , the Federal Reserve , included , had very little control over the extent of that boom . 
 작성자 : 김홍식 일시 4 / 09 / 2013 09 : 44 : 00 오전