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Comment by fouc | Hacker News Reader

Mostly I just know Alan Greenspan for being a disciple of Ayn Rand back in the 1950s/60s. Though the Objectivists didn't like his work at the federal reserve. In 2008 he admits to being shocked that banks weren't rationally selfish.

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Related article from around that time: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2008/10/alan-shrugged/

The banks were not, the bankers were.

The guy who called the Federal Reserve the "penny in the fuse box" of the economy was not an "Ayn Rand disciple" by the time he took the chairmanship. Power as chair of the Council of Economic Advisers under Ford really transformed him and I think severed the tenuous hold he had on her principles.

The libertarian community really thought they had their fox in the hen house when he was put in charge of regulation, and he did a fair bit of deregulation, but not nearly to the extent that they wanted. In the end it was enough to trigger a major financial crisis, but not enough to completely collapse the world economy and return to the feudalism they wanted.

What regulations did he as federal reserve chair rollback and which of them caused the 2008 crash?

He killed Brooksley Born’s proposed derivatives regulations in the late 90’s.

> but not enough to completely collapse the world economy and return to the feudalism they wanted.

Don’t worry, wealthy drug addict pedophiles in Silicon Valley are carrying that torch now.

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