Anna Schwartz--"blame the Fed".(Inside Track)(Brief article)

"There never would have been a sub-prime mortgage crisis if the Fed had been alert. This is something Alan Greenspan must answer for," said Dr. Anna Schwartz in an interview with British journalist Ambrose Evans-Pritchard that appeared in the Sunday Telegraph on January 13. Dr. Schwartz, who won fame as an economist in 1965 as a coauthor with Milton Friedman of A Monetary History of the United States, continues, at age 92, her scholarly work at the National Bureau of Economic Research, where she has worked for the past seven decades.

Evans-Pritchard writes concerning her criticism of the Federal Reserve System:

 
       According to Schwartz the original sin of the 
   Bernanke-Greenspan Fed was to hold rates at 1 per cent 
   from 2003 to June 2004, long after the dotcom bubble was over. 
   "It is clear that monetary policy was too accommodative. Rates 
   of 1 per cent were bound to encourage all kinds of risky 
   behaviour," says Schwartz. 
 
       She ...