I received this book form a regular reader of mine on Tax Day of 2006, up until that day I hadn’t even heard about it. Ravi Batra 288 page book was publish back in May of 2005, but the title is very impressive. I’ve been criticized for years for calling Greenspan a fraudster, so I can give a little smile to see a book with that title.

Overall this is a decent book, if not a little to neoliberal bent. It is rare to see someone a little on the left criticize the man that made Clinton famous for his artificially balanced budget and artificially prosperous economy. I recommend it for the facts and information he brings, but not entirely for all of his opinions. He’s an anti-supply sider, and he’s definitely pro-taxation. Nonetheless, this is one purchase I can recommend that isn’t completely backed by free market thinking.

Mr. Batra works at Southern Methodist University in Texas as the Professor of Economics. The book is an easy read, taking me only 2 days of casual reading to get through it. The various chapters are separated very nicely, covering all the fraudulent aspects of Greenspan’s long career as the Chairman of the Federal Reserve. It covers not just the inflationary cycle that has created the boom and bust of the dotcom sector, but also dives into the problems we face today in the housing markets throughout the country. Easy money brings hard problems later on, especially for the middle and lower class. While Mr. Batra doesn’t go as far as I do in showing the reader how inflationary money is a wealth transfer mechanism (from the late-coming middle class to the early-entry elite), the book does condemn Greenspan’s various manipulations from an economist’s perspective.

The second chapter of this book talks about something we often forget about — how Greenspan’s excess was part of the Social Security scam of the early 1980’s, and how that manipulation is causing great financial stress for that welfare agency today.

I don’t think Batra is a free marketeer, though, and he finds blame in Bush’s lowering of the upper tax rate, and says that the nation prospered when Clinton raised taxes. The book definitely has neo-liberal leanings, but it has many good statistics to show how money supply manipulations have long lasting negative effects on the economy down the line. I’m not one to believe that all bubbles follow a certain multi-year cycle, or that we can predict the next bubble in terms of months and years when comparing it to previous ones. The Internet has opened the market to new places for money to run to, which can cause inflation in some markets and deflation in others — this is the reality of inflation.

Batra also doesn’t see that you can walk away from the inflation-employment see saw by ending preferential and paternalist treatment of certain industries and companies. Inflation does lower unemployment, but only temporarily — it pushes it back for another decade or generation. When the market understands that slow deflation is healthy, and workers understand that a pay-cut can actually mean gaining more value (when everyone works more productively and lowers their prices as well), we can see a slow deflation with higher employment. How an economist can’t understand that is beyond me.