Actually Senator Clinton's proposal was far more ridiculous. She suggested having former Federal Reserve Board chairman Alan Greenspan and former Treasury Secretary and current Citigroup honcho Robert Rubin lead a commission (along with former Federal Reserve Board chairman Paul Volcker) to analyze the country's current economic crisis. There is certainly no one more directly responsible for the current crisis than Alan Greenspan, who allowed the housing bubble to grow unchecked for almost a decade. Also, as the country's preeminent bank regulator, he looked the other as the predatory mortgage market exploded. While Greenspan is undoubtedly villain #1 in the housing bubble story, Robert Rubin has claim to #2 status in his post near the helm of Citigroup. Citigroup provided the secondary market for many of these predatory mortgages with its creative financial engineering and structured investment vehicles. Senator Clinton also called for the government to deliberately prop up house prices. Economists routinely ridicule such efforts at price controls even when they are applied to items that are of far less importance to the economy. It is remarkable that none of the media accounts of Clinton's proposal noted the absurdity of placing figures who were central to the creation of the current crisis on a commission to deal with the crisis. Nor did it present any analysis by economists of the extraordinary proposal to create a system of housing price supports. This might have warranted more press attention than the sermons of Senator Obama's minister.
--Dean Baker
