A bizarre letter to the editor in the Business section of the Boston Globe:
Current Fed chief isn’t the walrus I was making a purchase at a pharmacy in Harwich and a conversation with the manager of the store turned to the economy and he said something that made sense: “I liked that guy. You know the one who I didn’t know what he was talking about. He made me feel like everything was going to be all right.
Like a dress hemline, there are really only two ways the economy and stock market can go - up or down. Chairman Greenspan could make this reassuringly complicated. His statement before a subcommittee during a troubling interlude might go something like this: “Investor confidence will wane slightly for the time being, resulting in a somewhat lower strength in the market; however the atmosphere of consumer awareness of available spending capacity will lead to a greater sense of commercial robustness and flexibility, eventually returning the economy to its fundamental stability.” And all of us “Joe Mailbox” investors would say, “Well, OK, I’m not sure I understand what he’s talking about, but if he’s not worried, I’m not worried.”
The current Fed chairman needs to step in there from time to time with sonorous sophistry like Lewis Carroll’s walrus, “talk of many things, of shoes and ships and sealing wax and cabbages and kings, and why the sea is boiling hot, and whether pigs have wings.
Vis A. Liepkalns Harwich
