Well done, John!

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Nice video.

Damn good interview.

I almost want to attribute John Stewart's fumbling questions to the Ron Paul Effect. He was even stating his questions from a populist perspective, eg, "These stock market guys with bigger houses are shooting craps and the working man is working"...

I wonder if he understood Greenspan's closing point: that the Fed moderates the occasional stupid panic and the occasional stupid greed of humanity. It chops off the outlying emotion-informed surges to smooth the surface of the economy, inasmuch as is possible.

Stewart sounded so naive about what "free market" means! I love the man, but wow, I guess the politically-partisan culture he's surrounded with isn't interested in some of the central political questions of our time. Perhaps the Ron Paul Effect will contribute to remedying that. Greenspan was talking about (the emotionality of) people not improving (or "stabilizing"); no need to be "bummed out" when we can improve our discernment in so many other ways.

I second qbert that Stewart has no idea what he's talking about.

I guess he's just your regular Joe who wants some answers just like all of us regular people do.

And just like us regular people, Stewart doesn't know what exactly makes Greenspan Greenspan and asks him all these questions that Greenspan was never responsible for, just because he's a high government official.

I saw it a bit differently. Stewart was making a bunch of naive comments to bait Greenspan before dropping the real question, the one about choosing to favor investment over working, the one that visibly knocked Greenspan back in his chair for a second. He came back very well, and Stewart went back to his harmless ignorant talk show host act.

You don't need to be rich to invest in a mutual fund and make 5 to 10 times the interest you'd get in a bank. You can set up a direct deposit of $100 or $200 per month.

well, of course, the naive questions are the really problematic ones. If you want to play the knowledgeable game you get screwed by the powerful, thats the way the game works. Sometimes you have to dumb down the discourse to see the irrationality of certain fundamentals.

lol if you think jon stewart is not acting.

Regarding "5 to 10 times the interest you'd get in a bank", Qbert takes 4.5% interest on his no-limit money market account with PSECU, and over 5% on his Paypal balance (which he aggressively maintains).

Who here thinks John Stewart or any other eat-the-rich populist bellyacher shops around for a good rate? No, the guys who bellyache about how unfair the system is just refuse to accept that it is within their power to optimize their own experience.

Like it or not, the Fed system is designed not to protect the rich, but rather to maintain stability (and thus peace) in the world. It is perfectly within the power of our elected officials to tax *ell out of the top 2% to stimulate social mobility, and I'm all for that. Just as it's a traditional rightist canard to blame regulation for all societal ills, it's a traditional leftist canard to insist that someone or something must necessarily be to blame for the inequality that has always and will always exist in the world.

I don't want rich people shooting craps and poor people slaving. But the world resembled that dramatization even more BEFORE the Fed came to be.

"the Fed system is designed not to protect the rich, but rather to maintain stability (and thus peace) in the world"....

At what cost???... and fast-forward to the now. The Fed is a hydra, broken and starved.

One economic system, one currency??? How about seven or ten??? Why, it has been tried before, and never let off the ground, perhaps it's best. Men who made carbs in their garages, in their spare time to run 100 miles on a gallon of gas, have tried that as well......where are they now?

The FED is part of the reason the world is fucked up, and only a small part of the reason it is not.

Well, my mutual fund has averaged something like 25% annual return over the last 5 years, and I haven't seen any FDIC insured bank accounts with higher than 3% interest rates. Paypal is not guaranteed at all.

This issue is way more complicated than John makes it seem.

Mutual funds all the way, jwray! I hardly make much money right now, but my mutual funds are fun to check on every once in a while. I'm trying as hard as I can to retire early.

This wasn't an interesting interview. There's no way you're gonna stump Greenspan on anything economic, and there's no way you're going to learn anything about economics by watching a comedian interview him.

I'm a Stewart fan, and this was nothing special. It just gets upvotes because it's Stewart. Abstained.

Greenspan on Charlie Rose was excellent a few weeks back. Very powerful and poignant observations, and an amazing run-down of his very interesting life.

People need to remember that Jon Stewart first and foremost goes after laughs, so when he quips at the end, it is just to get a laugh. This is not a formal, proper interview, or what you might call it, where the key interest is new knowledge - it's for laughs. The knowledge is second-hand.

*books

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I would love to see this interview. Let me know when they turn off the region-blocking.

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