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b40d-48b2-979eyesterday at 2:04 PM4 repliesview on HN

And when production for a system I built burns down the month after I leave my job, the next guy they hire was actually the culprit! Greenspan was seen as responsible for the dot-com bust as well which was solidly in the center of his tenure.


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shagieyesterday at 2:16 PM

The new IT manager walks into his office. He sits down and goes through his desk and finds three envelopes with the numbers 1, 2, and 3 on them with the attached letter:

    Congratulations on your new job.  To help you out, I've enclosed three pieces of advice to follow when you encounter an intractable problem.  Open them in order.
A short few months later there was a significant production outage. Things wouldn't work and management was getting angry. After a long day of angry meetings he went to his desk and opened the first letter. It read "Blame it on your predecessor."

The next day in the meetings he blamed it on his predecessor and told of all the things that weren't done right... routine patching left undone, documentation in disarray. Upper management grumbled but agreed to give him the time to fix it.

Two years later there was another outage. This one went on for a day or two and management was once again getting angry about things and so he went to his desk and pulled out the second letter. "Blame it on the hardware."

With that, he went in pointing out that they were years behind on keeping the hardware itself up to date. Upper management grumbled again but agreed to a budget that allowed him to update the hardware.

For a while, everything was smooth and then it hit... another outage. He went to his desk and opened the third letter. "Prepare three envelopes."

conductryesterday at 2:57 PM

There was a stimulus check that went out around that time. I felt it insane that I was receiving a check when nobody in my life was negatively impacted, the economy didn’t seem hurt (no more then when you’re up then down at a blackjack table), it was just a rebalancing of people’s portfolios values. Turns out that started the wave of completely untargeted stimulus/aide that would come at every economic faltering. I wish we would at least try to identify who is in need during these times. It drives me crazy when I would see the lines at Gucci and LV type stores backed up every week a Covid check went out.

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dragonwriteryesterday at 4:29 PM

The dot-com bust produced an EXTREMELY mild recession (so mild that it was often misattributed to 9/11, which occurred when it was almost over.

OTOH, there was a lot of pain iny the subsequent expansion leading up to the 2008 , but that was all the fault of fiscal (eepecially tax) policy of the Bush Administration and thei Congressional allies, not Fed monetary policy. While Greenspan clearly ideologically supported the people doing that, it wasn't him and the Fed causing the problems.

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bhoustonyesterday at 2:07 PM

I think that this was relatively not known as a major risk far in advance otherwise more traders would have gotten rich. Michael Burry only started to short the market in late 2005, four months before Greenspan's term ended.

It is hard to ask Greenspan to have super natural powers of foresight beyond just about everyone else.

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