Another Precursor of the Greenspan Collapse

May as well call it what it is: the Greenspan Collapse--which came from the Greenspan Bubble.

Anyhoo, an early precursor was Clinton's Boskin Commission.

For those of you who may be unaware, Boskin is the economist/weasel/fraud who helped to officially distort the CPI, making it more or less worthless as a measure of inflation. The Boskin Commission was an act of fraud, a backdoor method to suppress Social Security cost of living adjustments (COLAs). To be blunt, it was an act of cowardice. Rather than man up and say “fix this, its broken, we can’t afford it” the commission took a different route — they fabricated a series of nonsense adjustments that artificially lowered CPI by 1.1%.

Thus, with "no inflation HERE", Greenspan could drop rates and pump cash. And he did.

As usual, Ritholtz has lots more, including a brief description of the real laughers: "substitution" and "hedonic adjustments."