Greenspan Attacks Bush, GOP

Former Fed chairman Alan Greenspan lambastes President Bush and his own party  for disastrous economic policies in a memoir published next week. He criticizes the GOP for abandoning fiscal restraint while it had control of both Congress and the White House, the Wall Street Journal reports. Republicans in Congress, he writes, "swapped principle for power. They ended up with neither. They deserved to lose."

Greenspan defends his own record in cutting interest rates in 2003 and keeping them low—policies often blamed for the housing bubble—as necessary to fend off  "corrosive deflation," and attributes the housing boom to the end of communism. Greenspan, who served under 6 presidents before retiring in 2006, opines on all of them in the memoir. He also writes about his little-known private life. (More Federal Reserve stories.)