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Mostpeople think that if Alan Greenspan were still chairman of the Federal Reserve, the US central bank would have cut interest rates more quickly and aggressively in response to the turmoil in financial markets.
Not so, Mr Greenspan says. Over the course of three hours of interviews in his office on Washington, DC's Connecticut Avenue, the former Fed chairman argues that times have changed.
"We are in a period now when it is far more difficult than it was when I was chairman," Mr Greenspan says. "We were not worried about inflationary resurgence but now you have to be." He adds: "You have got to be a lot more careful in lowering rates in response to crises."
Mr Greenspan's analysis puts him at odds with those - including Martin Feldstein, the influential president of the National Bureau of Economic Research - who argue that the Fed should cut rates aggressively on the grounds that making a mistake on inflation (as opposed to growth) would be the "lesser of two evils" at this juncture.
The former Fed chairman does not share this assessment of the balance of risks. "I weigh them differently," he says.
Mr Greenspan - who is revered in the market for his aggressive handling of past market crises - praises his successor Ben Bernanke's so-far cautious response to this one. "I would be hard-pressed to see what I would have done differently," he says.
The former Fed chairman is at once candid and slightly uncomfortable about commenting on current monetary policy debates. "I figured that there is no way to maintain what I have been doing and not comment on monetary policy, because I did so effectively - implicitly - in the book."
Mr Greenspan says: "I am basically saying that the trade-off between unemployment and inflation has shifted."
There are two planks to his argument. The less controversial one is that the US is entering a period of more subdued productivity growth. The former Fed chairman says companies would not be returning vast amounts of cash to their shareholders if they saw good opportunities for productivity-enhancing investment. "Innovation opportunities are, for the time being, somewhatsaturated, whereas they were extraordinary in the 1990s," he says.
The more controversial one is that the disinflationary effect of globalisation will soon start to ebb. "The rate of change of prices - or the degree of disinflation - is related to the rate of change of globalisation," he argues.
The integration of a billion workers from the once centrally-planned economies of China and the former Soviet bloc into the global market system had a profoundly disinflationary effect on prices worldwide. But once all these workers are connected to the world economy, he says, "the rate of change goes to zero."
"In the intermediate period, the disinflationary pressures I was fortunate to operate under are gradually disappearing."
Mr Greenspan is unimpressed by the rejoinder that inflation expectations look to be quite firmly anchored at low rates. "It is going to change," he says, fixing the interviewer through his trademark thick black-rimmed glasses.
Underlying cost pressures are beginning to increase. He also sees oil going to $100 a barrel and worries about rising deficits driven by entitlement spending as America and the rest of the rich world ages. "In that environment, inflation expectations will rise," he says, without the need for the Fed to make a policy mistake first.
Many economists contest Mr Greenspan's version of the relationship between globalisation and inflation. But in some respects his precise formulation of this relationship is less important than his deep conviction that it is no longer possible to understand how the US economy operates without seeing it as part of a global economic system that is undergoing profound transformation. "The issue is that the global forces are profoundly overwhelming," he says. "We cannot make a forecast for the US economy the way we used to."
This global analysis lies at the heart of his explanation of what caused the housing bubble that emerged during his watch as Fed chief. Mr Greenspan says the housing bubble was "fundamentally engendered by the decline in real long-term interest rates" caused by a cascade of surplus savings from fast-growing emerging market economies such as China. The fall in long-term rates provided the initial gain in house prices that unleashed later speculative activity. He blames human nature - though he talks about "euphoria" rather than "greed".
To his critics, who argue that the Fed fuelled the bubble by keeping interest rates too low for too long in the early 2000s, this is an exercise in passing the buck. But to Mr Greenspan, theirs is a parochial explanation that greatly exaggerates the Fed's power in a world of globally integrated capital markets.
When the Fed raised rates in 2004 and 2005, he points out, long-term rates went down rather than up. "We were pushing against something we could not control," he says. Long-term rates were "being determined external to monetary policy" by shifts in the global balance of desired savings and investment.
Critics say the Fed should have tried harder, raising rates sooner and faster. Mr Greenspan counters that that would not have been acceptable "to the political establishment" given the very low rate of inflation. He says "the presumption that we were fully independent and have full discretion was false."
But he says that even if the Fed had moved to raise rates more aggressively "we would have failed as miserably in trying to get the long-term rate up or the mortgage rate up as we failed in 2004."
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