Hitting the professional Bloomberg wires were the following quotes from Greenspan’s predecessor, the still-influential Paul Volcker, speaking at the LSE (no URL, I’m afraid. I’ll have to use the favourite line of our First Citizen, Antoine RobespiBlaire and say:’ C’mon! You have to...like.. trust me on this, guys.’)
`We have a record current-account deficit and we’re living off the munificence of strangers. The only reason we’re getting enough to fund the deficit is that Asian central banks are vigorously buying dollars.’
`We have an amount of stimulus beyond anything I’ve heard of in history,’ he also marvelled, before giving his verdict on the current financial market obsession:
‘If I were setting odds on deflation in the U.S. the probability wouldn’t reach 0.1 percent. I see no prospect of real deflation like we had in the U.S. and other countries in the 1930s.’
Quite!
