In which the onion muncher, Our Henry, and Killer Creighton compete for your attention and pleasure, and the winner is ...

 

A housekeeping note.

The pond is off to the deep south for about a week. This is an incredibly dangerous mission - from what the pond understands from reading the lizard Oz, Melbourne is full of commie swine and weird socialistic pinko leftie preverts, who pose a constant danger to everyone.

The pond hopes to survive, and in the meantime, rather than let the site wither entirely, has arranged for a tour of News Corp tabloid trash.

Perforce this will feature tediously out of date stuff, but the pond hopes it provides a few distractions. In any case, it will ensure that correspondents will be able to post thoughts and opinions on the real reptile news of the day.

Now read on for your Friday herpetology studies treats ...

Hold on, before beginning, the pond feels an obligation to mention a few things which are routinely "disappeared" from reptile coverage.

The poor old Poms, and Europe (Brexit!) continue to experience record hot days, cf the Graudian's UK and Switzerland record hottest ever June day as health emergencies surge in Europe

There's nary a peep out of the climate science denying reptiles about this phenomenon, but El Nino's coming to get you baby, so let's see how the ostrich routine works this Oz summer.

And the reptiles have been blathering endlessly about the need to study the Holocaust, but there's a genocide happening right now that's equally instructive, and again not a peep about it.

Again you have to turn to the Graudian to read Israeli former leaders and security chiefs threaten legal action over ‘Jewish terrorism’, Israeli former leaders and security chiefs threaten legal action over ‘Jewish terrorism’

... featuring a letter signed by, amongst others, two former prime ministers, former heads of all the Israeli security services, former judges, a Nobel laureate and the country’s most revered living novelist. 

Inter alia ...

The letter accused Netanyahu and his far-right coalition partners, who are expected to seek another term in power together, of enabling attacks on Palestinians to further an extremist agenda of ethnic cleansing and annexation.
“This is not solely a military and police failure, but the implementation of an overt policy by the Israeli government and its prime minister in general, and by the relevant ministers in particular,” the letter said.
“[They] order the military, the police, and Shin Bet [the internal security agency] to enable the terrorism of Jewish criminals, because this horrendous phenomenon serves well the current government’s ideology of carrying out ‘ethnic cleansing’ in the territories of Judea and Samaria to facilitate their future annexation.”
The letter also drew parallels with historic attacks on Jewish communities in Europe. “The crimes of Jewish terrorism in the territories are reminiscent of similar crimes and pogroms committed against our people by other nations in eastern Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries.”
Israel’s military was complicit in this campaign of terror, through a failure to intervene and active participation in violence, the letter said.
Attackers have included members of regional defence units, men in part-uniform, and men who were not in active service but carried weapons they got from the Israeli military or national security ministry.
“The IDF [Israel Defense Forces] has clear policy of ignoring the crimes of Jewish terrorism, and in many incidents soldiers from the regional defense units and [settlement] security squads are themselves involved in the crimes of Jewish terrorism,” the letter said.

Cf Ehud Olmert in Haaretz, Israel Is Conducting a Systematic Campaign of Ethnic Cleansing and Crimes Against Humanity in the West Bank (*intermittent archive link)

And there's a relevant Wilcox cartoon ...

By way of contrast, what do the reptiles offer?

A triptych of drivel, and the pond will be naming a winner of its suddenly invented "best reptile drivel of the day" competition.

First up, a fairly standard serve of drivel from the onion muncher.

The pond realises that at this moment, a catatonic silence descends on correspondents, accompanied by an intense desire to immediately stop reading, but this site is only for the most hardened herpetologists, willing to swallow any garbage ...

Sad to say, ever since his Viktor Orbán junkets have dried up the relentless narcissist has been restless, and so this ...

The header: Let’s reject shame and defeatism – and share in national pride; Blackening a country’s history is one of the most effective ways to undermine the morale of its people.
The caption for a painting which will begin the usual bout of triumphalism: The Founding of Australia, an oil sketch by Algernon Talmage. Picture: Supplied by the State Library of NSW

The pond must issue a couple of warnings.

First the reptiles claim this is a six minute read.

Secondly that means a full six minutes of nausea.

Thirdly don't expect anything other than the rote, mindless repetition of nauseating blather about the monarchy (O noble King Chuck), the glossing over of the treatment doled out to Aboriginal people, blather about the "Anglo-Celtic core culture and the Judaeo-Christian foundational ethos" and so on and so forth.

In other words, it's more than enough to induce a Technicolor yawn.

The history of nations, how it’s presented and how it’s thought of, matters to countries and their citizens, no less than our own personal history matters to us as individuals. Because just as it’s hard for individuals to think well of themselves if they’re ashamed of their past, likewise, it’s hard for countries to be strong and self-confident if they’re constantly self-flagellating over their alleged historical crimes. This is what Orwell was driving at when he said that he who controls the past controls the future.
And there’s no doubt that the past of countries like Britain, the United States, and Australia too, is now being comprehensively recast as a story of shame. Americans are expected to angst over slavery, even though they fought their bloodiest war to be rid of it. Britons are expected to angst over the empire, even though it was actually the Royal Navy that stamped out the transatlantic slave trade. And Australians are expected to fret over the dispossession of the original inhabitants, even though British settlement marked the arrival on an ancient continent of science, technology, the rule of law and the notions of human rights that have eventually given Aboriginal people a vastly better life.
Mind you, no country’s history is without blemish. Edmund Burke characterised the American Revolution as a revolution for the traditional rights of Englishmen in the New World; but, personally, I reckon Americans might sometimes miss the Crown. There’s been no better illustration of the magic of the monarchy than the fact that the King is the only western leader that Donald Trump hasn’t been rude about!

The reptiles tried to dress up this blather with cheap archival moments, as if that would add gravitas to the blather, U.S. Capitol paintings. Declaration of Independence, painting by John Trumbull. Picture: Getty Images

But this is the onion muncher, peddling for the umpteenth time blather about the black arm band notion of history:

Blackening a country’s history is one of the most effective ways to undermine the morale of its people. That’s why it’s been so prevalent over the past few decades, as the left’s long march through the institutions has intensified.
For instance, the most recent academic history of Australia, published last November, opens by declaring that the traditional notion of settlement, as a largely peaceful expansion, is no less than the “founding lie” of modern Australia, masking what the author claims was a brutal conquest. Even though it was always official policy – albeit imperfectly observed – that the Aboriginal peoples of Australia should enjoy all the rights and protections of British subjects.
Far from being the tale of near-genocidal oppression, the better story of Australia is how a convict colony, within a century, not only had the world’s highest standard of living but was actually the world’s leading pioneer of liberal democracy. By 1860, the then-self-governing Australian colonies had universal male suffrage – some 60 years before Britain. By the 1890s, in South Australia, people of both sexes and all races could not only vote, but run for office too. And in one of its very first acts, in 1902, the new Australian commonwealth granted all women the right to vote, almost 30 years before Britain.
And yes, there was conflict on the frontiers of settlement. At Myall Creek, for instance, in northern NSW, a group of stockmen brutally murdered up to 30 Aboriginal men, women and children. But there was a sequel. Eventually, seven white men were hanged for the murder of black people – in Australia in 1838 – at that time almost unparalleled in any settler society.
So here’s the problem: countries supposedly tainted by original sin, whether slavery, imperialism, or dispossession of the original inhabitants, fundamentally lack legitimacy. And a country so tainted can hardly have the right to defend itself or to keep its culture, even if the country in question has actually been so colour-blind that it attracts migrants from all over the world. And even if it’s actually the long Anglo-American ascendancy, and the post-war Pax Americana that’s created the world that, despite everything, remains more free, more fair, more safe, and more rich, for more people, than at any time in history.
What, then, might those persuaded that their country’s history is shameful do by way of atonement?

What to do by way of atonement? Might not the onion muncher retire to a seminary and contemplate his many sins, or at least his navel, and in the process make the world a more tolerant and tolerable place?

Nah, to satiate the incessant narcissism, an unquenchable thirst, the reptiles obliged with a snap, Liberal Party Federal President Tony Abbott. Picture: Asanka Ratnayake / Getty Images

At this point the pond should note that the reptiles this morning seized on something designed to terrify the hive mind, manna from racist reptile heaven, and made it top of the "news", ma ...

EXCLUSIVE
Peak union’s demand to Labor: try again for an Indigenous voice
The ACTU has broken with Anthony Albanese by calling for a new Indigenous voice body and demanding Australia Day be moved.
By Noah Yim and Paige Taylor

Shock, horror, panic and sound the alarums, and fainting fits for months to come for the lizards of Oz, and sprinkle some 4711 Eau de Cologne on a hankie, and... send in the onion muncher...

Well, in Australia, they could seek to amend the constitution to give people with some Aboriginal descent more say than others over the government of the country. They could delegitimise the national flag by flying it co-equally with indigenous flags on all government buildings and at all civic occasions. They could begin all public speeches by acknowledging the traditional owners of “what always was and always will be” un-ceded land. They could change the school curriculum so that every subject, from maths to Latin, is taught from an indigenous perspective. They could invoke a climate crisis to close down our main exports and to hobble heavy industry. They could defund the armed forces now, while claiming to boost them in the far distant future. They could insist that gender is a social construct, rather than a function of biology, to confuse and subvert troubled adolescents.
But for those with a grudge against their own country, it’s sustained mass migration, especially from countries with quite different cultures, that’s the surest and swiftest way to change and punish a place that’s irredeemably tainted by unforgivable sin; in order to dilute and eventually to extinguish the Anglo-Celtic core culture and the Judaeo-Christian foundational ethos, that’s actually what attracts migrants to the Anglosphere, but that today’s left-establishment finds so suffocating and judgmental; and it’s to encourage migrants to “other” themselves by funding ethnic activism under Orwellian slogans like “our diversity is our unity” or “our diversity is our strength”.
In this regard, migrants from Islamic countries are especially useful, because belief in a global caliphate, and the conviction that it’s the Koran rather than the legislature that validates law, starts to make pluralist democracy unworkable. To green-left, cultural-Marxist governments, mass migration from the “global south” is not a problem; it’s the plan. It’s the way for supposedly unjustly rich countries to atone for their white privilege and to apologise to poorer ones by becoming more like them.

Uh oh, time now for a billy goat butt, what with him being a bloody furriner himself ...

I stress, this is not an attack on immigrants, nearly all of whom come to countries like Australia to join us, not to change us. But in enough numbers, change us they do, and not always for the better.
Australia’s post-war migration was a wonderful new chapter in our history. As well as more people from Britain, migrants came from southern and Eastern Europe, and increasingly from all over the world. As “new Australians” – so they were dubbed – they were expected to integrate from day one and to assimilate as quickly as possible, mainly by working hard, playing sport and using local schools. Which they gladly did, because the vast majority of them wanted to become as Australian as possible as quickly as possible.

How the pond loathes this man, with a visceral loathing that transcends talk of the 1950s primary school understanding of history that he offers ...James Cook landed at Botany Bay in 1770 on the HMAS Endeavour.

And at last came a final gobbet of bigotry ...

More recent migration – the million migrants in a single year that recently entered Britain, the half a million in a single year that recently entered Australia, and the 10 million, perhaps, that flooded into the US during the Biden presidency – has been more problematic, though rarely through lack of goodwill on migrants’ part. It’s because misguided governments have celebrated every culture but our own; and because cheap travel and the internet have made it easier for people to live in two countries at once.
And for some, like the migrant father and his Australian-born son, who recently turned Bondi Beach into a shooting gallery, to nurture the ancient hatreds that weak-willed governments have been too cowardly to name lest they be accused of racism.
Still, there’s nothing better than to have people visibly not of Anglo-Celtic ancestry, speaking with a broad accent, Australian, British or American, palpably proud of their country. There’s no better testimony to the gravitational pull of the Western way of life and – in Australia – the universal appeal of a country that extends a “fair go” to all, especially to those who “have a go” too.
Modern Australia has an Indigenous heritage, a British foundation and an immigrant character, starting with the settlers, who were then joined by people from almost every land. How a convict colony became such a “shining city on a hill” is a great story, but we do migrants no favours by deliberately making our country more like the ones they left.
So let’s stop distorting our past, let’s stop thinking small about what our countries can do, let’s reject the defeatism and declinism that’s characterised Western elites, and above all, let’s remind all our migrants that they are joining the best countries on earth.
Tony Abbott is the federal president of the Liberal Party. He served as Australia’s 28th prime minister. He delivered this speech to the Alliance of Responsible Citizenship in London.

If the Liberal party thinks this sort of carry on is the way to win the centre, then the long absent lord help the centre.

Do they really think that this sort of bigotry can beat the experts at the game?

The pond apologises for the onion muncher displacing Our Henry, especially as the onion muncher offered the sort of childish history lesson the hole in bucket man would disdain.

When it comes to history, Our Henry is more a nice china cup and decent historical aged tea sort of chap.

Never mind, there's a time for everything and now is his time; please, let Our Henry enter the competition with a Shaksperian flourish...

The header: Keir Starmer’s fall a sign of our ‘time of troubles’; Andy Burnham’s policies are only likely to worsen the structural forces that overwhelmed Starmer.

There was no caption for the snap, which is surprising because surely the reptiles could at least have noted that Larry the cat is missing from the shot.

There must be something in the water cooler this morning because Our Henry rabbited on for a bigly five minutes.

But the pond forgives him because this day he went full Shakspere, and what's more indulged in the fancy that Shakspere's view of British history can be taken straight, rather than as a reflection of Elizabethan times, with the plays a way of discussing matters of state that the authorities would have regarded as seditious without the benefit of theatrical fiction (cf this blog)

Lay on, McHenry ...

As vultures circled above 10 Downing Street, Shakespeare’s famous line in Henry IV, Part 2 – “Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown” – must have rung painfully true for Keir Starmer. The irony was that few British prime ministers had greater reason to feel secure: in the 2024 election, Labour won 411 of the House of Commons’ 650 seats, second only to Tony Blair’s majority in 1997.
Yet appearances were deceptive. Starmer’s victory had been secured on just 33.7 per cent of the vote, the lowest vote share ever recorded by a majority-winning party. This was a textbook “loveless landslide”, reflecting no surge of enthusiasm for either Starmer or Labour. What little love there was then dissipated at lightning speed: within six weeks, Starmer’s net satisfaction rating had turned negative.
Not that it would have been much comfort, but Starmer is hardly the only recent British prime minister to suffer so precipitous a decline. Political leaders, it seems, now reach the summit only to be hurled from it.
It took 22 months for John Major’s net popularity rating to turn negative; remarkably, Tony Blair’s remained positive for nearly six years. The contrast with more recent experience could scarcely be greater: on average, the past seven British prime ministers have fallen into net negative territory in less than five months. Worse, the pace of political collapse has accelerated. Gordon Brown, David Cameron, Theresa May and Boris Johnson all enjoyed a honeymoon period. Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak had none, while Starmer’s was over in a flash.
The result is a story in three acts. Tony Blair spent 60 per cent of his prime ministership in positive territory. Excluding Johnson, whose ratings were distorted by Covid, that figure fell to just 32 per cent for Brown, Cameron and May. With Truss, Sunak and Starmer, it shrank to a mere 3 per cent.

Poor Keir, now just part of an Our Henry listicle, Keir Starmer. Picture: Peter Macdiarmid / Getty Images

Sadly this focus on the Poms and Shakspere meant Our Henry had to abandon Thucydides for the nonce and for the pleasures of regicide

But he did try a little contemporary Oz relevance ...

The parallel with Australia is obvious. Both John Howard and Kevin Rudd enjoyed 26 months in positive territory. For Julia Gillard, Tony Abbott, Malcolm Turnbull and Scott Morrison that moment of sunshine lasted, on average, just six months. Anthony Albanese did better, but he too is now in the doldrums. Between 2000 and 2013, Australian prime ministers spent 63 per cent of their time in positive territory; after 2013, that share fell by a third.
In both Britain and Australia, as the descent into unpopularity accelerated, so did the rate of defenestration. The spiral, though, is far older than the opinion poll: and if there is a lesson of history, it is that regicide feeds on itself, unleashing a cycle of tumultuous instability.
It was that world of repeated usurpations Shakespeare dramatised in the Henriad, where Henry IV, having deposed Richard II, feared so grievously for his own fate. His anxiety was well-founded: of the six English monarchs who met violent deaths, five died in near succession across the century and a half to 1485.
What was true in England prevailed more broadly. Across European monarchies between 1000 and 1800, usurpers were roughly three times more likely to suffer a violent or involuntary end than legitimate rulers. The repercussions did not stop with them: even the legitimate successors of usurpers were twice as likely to be deposed as the direct heirs of legitimate monarchs. Once the spiral of deposition and counter-deposition was unleashed, regaining stability took, on average, six or seven turbulent successions.
That one regicide led to another is unsurprising. Whoever obtained the throne by regicide lacked legitimacy; the demonstration effect of the original regicide invited encores, and; living in fear of the sword, both the regicide king and his immediate successors focused on self-preservation rather than effective rule, provoking the very fate they sought to avoid.
Kingdoms in which monarchs were deposed therefore suffered what the Russians called a “Time of Troubles”: scarred by regicide, they reeled under punishments denounced from the pulpit as signs of divine wrath, until an extraordinarily capable leader finally seized control.
That was the lesson Shakespeare placed at the heart of the Henriad. Richard II’s title was beyond dispute, and he believed its sacred character sheltered him from challenge: “Not all the water in the rough rude sea / Can wash the balm off from an anointed king”. But Richard mistook legitimacy for immunity. It is not lawful title alone that sustains kingship, Shakespeare suggested; it is the prudence, judgment and stewardship that convert legitimacy into enduring authority.

What a strong ploy, and perhaps a commentary on the onion muncher himself, something of a put down, as prudence, judgment and stewardship that convert legitimacy into enduring authority was never a feature of the onion muncher's brief reign.

It might have put Our Henry ahead in the competition, but then the reptiles ruined things by abandoning the Shakspere motif.

The reptiles were simply unable to resist featuring former chairman Rudd, and Juliar, who still live rent free in the hive mind, Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard arrive at the 45th National Labor Conference on July 30, 2009. Picture: Lisa Maree Williams / Getty Images

Talk about a bummer, from Shakspere to a reminder of ancient reptile obsessions.

Our Henry at last got around to admitting that perhaps Shakspere was on about his times as much as, or more than, the past ...

Lacking those qualities, Richard discovered too late that even an anointed king can lose his crown. “I wasted time,” he reflects in prison, “and now doth time waste me.” Shakespeare’s Henry IV answers that fate by displaying the very qualities whose absence had undone Richard: true to his word, careful with his allies, resolute against England’s enemies – above all, mindful of the people.
Yet none of that spared Henry the upheavals that convulsed his reign. For he ruled in a society undergoing profound social and political transformation, where shifting patterns of wealth, power and allegiance had already weakened traditional bonds of authority and increased the demands on the monarchy far beyond the resources available to meet them.
Shakespeare’s England was also wrecked by a far-reaching disruption; and so is today’s Britain. The electorate has fragmented, shattering the social and economic coalitions on which the major parties once depended, and making it increasingly difficult to assemble mass constituencies. In turn, that fragmentation has been mirrored within the parties, weakening internal alliances while intensifying the jockeying for position. As the major parties seem ever more caught up in their internal dramas, the political fringe has expanded but has not found a stable base.

And yet no mention of Brexit? And the Brexit follies?

Et tu, Our Henry?

Not a single mention of the caper that has cascaded down through little England's history for the past decade?

At the same time, Britain is mired in its most acute and prolonged productivity slump since the Industrial Revolution, slowing the growth of living standards and of public revenues. Having been assured that governments can nonetheless sate every thirst, soothe every pain and solve every woe, voters inevitably swing between unrealistic hope and bitter disappointment, perpetuating the cycle of instability.
And with Britain’s cast of recent prime ministers recalling Shakespeare’s magnificent, hyphenated adjectives – dog-hearted, milk-livered, shrill-gorged, lust-dieted, which all appear within a few pages of that tragedy of hubris and betrayal, King Lear – no Henry V has emerged to tame the Time of Troubles.

Time now to nip the future heir apparent in the bud ...Andy Burnham greets supporters at the Labour campaign HQ at Stubshaw Cross Community and Sports Club. Picture: Christopher Furlong / Getty Images

And so Our Henry, taking on the role of vulture, circles, was ready to swoop...

Andy Burnham is hardly a plausible candidate for that role. His policies seem designed to deepen the productivity crisis rather than solve it. Unwilling to remove the constraints on growing the pie, his only solution is to rob one group to appease another. As that runs into its limits, hope will once again curdle into disappointment, disappointment into fury – and fury into the search for yet another saviour.
That is territory we know all too well. Nor have we truly left it. For the moment the regicides have receded; the structural conditions that fuelled them have not. They are, on the contrary, growing more acute. Alarm bells should therefore be blaring, both here and in the UK. If all you hear is smugness and complacency, that is merely the sound a kingdom makes, in the hush, as the circling vultures prepare to descend.

Splendid stuff, especially as Our Henry, together with the rest of the hive mind, managed to avoid mad King Donald's three ring circus ...

But had the Onion Muncher and Our Henry done enough to win, what with Killer Creighton offering incredibly strong competition, albeit with only a modest three minute IPA-inflected read?

The header: Alan Greenspan: the economics visionary who paved the way to financial crisis; Like the influence of John Maynard Keynes in the postwar era,

The caption: Alan Greenspan testifies before the Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee in Washington, July 1990. Picture: Luke Frazza / AFP

There is of course a profound irony here, what with Greenspan very IPA in outlook, and yet clearly responsible for disaster. 

And so Killer has to propose that Greenspan came to resemble Keynes, neigh, was a kindred, kissing cousin Keynesian, and so that damned ruinous interventionist way could take a Killer rap over the knuckles yet again.

It's nonsense of course, but sublime in a Killer IPA way ...

If Alan Greenspan had died at age 80, obituaries would’ve lauded the former Federal Reserve chair as one of the greatest-ever economics practitioners. Instead, history will record Greenspan, who died aged 100 earlier this week, as a brilliant, contradictory figure whose self-admitted flaws paved the way for the global financial crisis of 2008 and the ongoing collapse in credibility central banks everywhere continue to suffer.
An acolyte of libertarian Ayn Rand in his younger years, Greenspan became more like John Maynard Keynes, whose interventionist ideas most shaped postwar economic policy. Like Keynes, Greenspan was a polymath who became very rich as a shrewd investor before bursting into public life as chair of the Federal Reserve – an institution he’d earlier called “one of the historic disasters in American history”, courtesy of Ronald Reagan in 1987.
Both men’s careers were buoyed by stockmarket crashes whose impacts on the broader economy were vastly different. Correlation is not causation, yet the minimal impact of the Black Monday crash on the broader economy was put down to Greenspan’s wise provision of liquidity. It was a playbook he returned to repeatedly after the collapse of the massive hedge fund Long Term Capital Management in 1998 and the dotcom collapse in 2001, when Greenspan slashed the official Fed funds rate to 1 per cent.

The reptiles flung in a snap, suggesting it might be slick Willy's fault, Alan Greenspan looks on as President Clinton speaks in the Oval Office, where the president nominated Greenspan to serve a fourth term as Fed chairman.

Now there might be some correspondents who remember the WSJ take, covered by the pond and saved to the intermittent archive, with the heading including "his faith in financial markets’ ability to police themselves became an Achilles’ heel".

Former colleagues and Nobel laureate Milton Friedman hailed Greenspan as the greatest central banker of all time when he finished 18 1/2 years as Federal Reserve chairman in 2006. Just two years later, the financial crisis triggered an austere reappraisal of his record. His view that markets could effectively police themselves became a driving force of regulatory policy in the 1990s and early 2000s.

Inter alia ...

None of that for Killer ... 

It's not because in this Killer version of Greenspan he didn't intervene; somehow magically it's because he was an interventionist, the famous Killer IPA ploy of "black is white", and facts are always alternative...

The infamous “Greenspan put” was born: the risk of economic collapse and severe financial losses that most – especially small businesses – faced wouldn’t apply in financial markets, at least for the big players.
The powerful Wall Street elite who happened to be the Fed’s clients would be rescued collectively by ultra-low interest rates and behind-the-scenes pro bono co-ordination. But the “long and variable lags” of monetary policy taught to economics students at university had been forgotten by his admirers by the time Greenspan retired after 19 years, in 2006.
His tenure had overlapped with arguably the most halcyon period of US economic history: booming productivity growth alongside relatively low inflation without any of the severe economic downturns that blotted earlier periods. But as US economist Rudiger Dornbusch once remarked, “things take longer to happen than you think they will and then they happen faster than you thought they could”.
Artificially easy money and the Greenspan put combined to trigger a massive financial crisis and recession from late 2007, which put millions out of work, destroyed trillions of dollars of household wealth, and prompted a litany of execrable bailouts of financial institutions.
His successors, Ben Bernanke and Janet Yellen, took Greenspan’s interventionist bent to new heights, launching successive rounds of “quantitative easing” that encouraged governments to rack up massive public debts that would’ve made Keynes blush.
The Covid pandemic brought still more radical interventions that finally shattered what remained of central banks’ hard-won reputation for maintaining price stability. Perhaps it was Greenspan’s famous love of Delphic utterances that has aged less well. “I’ve learned to mumble with great incoherence. If I seem unduly clear to you, you must have misunderstood what I said,” he once joked before congress. It was the kind of colourful behaviour you wouldn’t expect from central bankers today. He even refused to bind the Federal Reserve to an explicit numerical inflation target after most other central banks had, arguing judgment was superior to mechanical rules. Again like Keynes, he placed greater faith in the discretion of exceptional policymakers than the rigours of the free market.

Oh yes, he was a devout Keynesian, and remember, you are entitled to your alternative reality, Alan Greenspan on the front of Time Magazine, February 1999.

And so to a final warning about the dangers of intervention, as only an IPA loon could scribble:

Yet old habits – despite all the obvious economic destruction caused since 2008 – die hard. Even free-market economists who would condemn government interference in any other part of the economy still assume it’s perfectly natural for bureaucrats to set the rate of interest. The Reserve Bank of Australia also operates in this world bestowed by Greenspan, whose “put” will prove very difficult to unwind without a major economic collapse. No financial institution in Australia, even a small one, would be allowed to wobble, let alone fail. Indeed, for all the talk of the need to reduce inflation, the RBA’s real target appears to be keeping dwelling prices high, credit flowing and the banking system profitable. Underlying inflation is headed to 4 per cent yet analysts are already pencilling in cuts in the knowledge inflation is in fact a secondary consideration.
“In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation. There is no safe store of value,” Greenspan wrote in a 1966 essay.
After the GFC he had “found a flaw” in the worldview he had trusted for four decades. Perhaps in his twilight years watching central banks struggle to achieve any mandate, Greenspan came to return to his earlier views.
Adam Creighton is chief economist at the Institute of Public Affairs.

If the pond had to pick a winner for the day, it would be Killer. 

Every correspondent will have their own favourite, and will likely dispute the pond's choice.

But here's the reasoning.

The onion munch is old and tired and repetitious, and reading him felt like watching a Tamworth dog return to his vomit in the noonday sun.

Our Henry showed ingenuity in dragging Shakspere back into the little English mess, but failed the Brexit test, not mentioning it once, though it haunts the country in much the same way that those ghosts haunted Hamlet and Macbeth.

Up against this feeble competition, Killer had a Killer ploy, because transforming Greenspan into Keynes is surely the work of an IPA genius ...

And now this ...

And now reptiles, time to watch the Beeb, so you'll be ready for the coming Australian summer...