Place your bets, folks! We've heard good arguments both for and against a Fed easing today but think the odds favor the doves. One of our regular correspondents, Erich Simon, actually expect the Fed to tighten ' a very distant longshot, in our view ' and we have reprinted his comments at bottom. One middle of-the-roader is Don Luskin, an acquaintance from our PSE options-floor days who now runs a company called Trend Macroclytics. Don had an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal last Thursday headlined 'The Greenspan Myth'. Expecting the essay to come down hard on the former Fed chairman, we were disappointed to see that it merely attempted to refute the widespread belief that Mr. Greenspan should be viewed as a hero for supposedly helping to prevent various crises of the recent past from turning disastrous: Long Term Capital Management, Mexico, the 1987 Crash, Russia and the 9/11 terror attacks. Don makes a pretty persuasive case that Mr. Greenspan in each instance was too late with too little and that market forces eventually did the job, but the essay was less convincing in concluding that the Fed chief's overrated heroism should not be invoked to push his successor, Mr. Bernanke, into an unwarranted easing. Don sees the U.S. economy as too robust at the moment to warrant Fed intervention, and on that point we would differ sharply; for, nowhere in Don's tally of the U.S. economy's supposed strengths does he even acknowledge the potentially grave troubles that currently beset the real estate sector. Greenspan to Blame Immediately below is the response we sent to Don. As Rick's Picks readers would expect, it eschews the genteel politeness toward Mr. Greenspan that writing op-ed for the WSJ requires. We dispense with such niceties not only because Mr. Greenspan's theoretically challenged
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