ALAN, WE HARDLY KNEW YE – AT 10:29 A.M. ET:  Alan Greenspan's wife, Andrea Mitchell of NBC, must be mortified.  She sometimes sounds like a spokeswoman for the Obama administration, and here is her husband, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve, warning that the Obama economy is still in trouble.  From Bloomberg: 

Just when you thought the U.S. economy was roaring back to health, Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan is here to tell you otherwise.

“The United States is doing better than anybody else, but we’re still not doing all that well,” Greenspan, 88, said today in an interview on Bloomberg Television’s “In the Loop” with Betty Liu. “We still have a very sluggish economy.”

And that, of course, is the point.  If you're getting C's in school, and everyone else is getting D's, you're at the top of your class.  But you're still getting C's.

Greenspan said the economy won’t fully recover until American companies invest more in productive assets and the housing market bounces back.

“Almost all of the weakness in the last four, five, six years has been in long-lived investments” in capital goods and real estate, Greenspan said. “Until these pick up, we’re not going to get the kind of vibrant growth that everyone is hoping for.”

Greenspan, who retired from the Fed’s helm in January 2006, said he expects growth to dip below a 3 percent annual rate in the fourth quarter of this year. His forecast is in line with the estimate of 2.5 percent in a Bloomberg survey of economists.

He spoke a week after revised figures showed gross domestic product expanded at a 5 percent rate in the third quarter, the fastest pace since 2003. The data helped drive the Dow Jones Industrial Average above 18,000 for the first time.

COMMENT:  That 5 percent figure is being seriously challenged, and may have been helped along by some serious cooking of the books, not surprising for the Obama crowd.  Look around you.  Are you really seeing boom times?  The "jobs recovery" is nothing of the kind.  Americans who once were well employed are having to settle for second-rate jobs or part-time jobs.

Greenspan is right.  I hope he survives the day.

December 31, 2014