I am good at seeing patterns in life and in data, and I am often good at predicting (although sometimes I do not follow my own good advice), but right now I am unwilling to spend the time necessary to perhaps substantiate the following possibility:

When Alan Greenspan decided to pop the High Tech stock bubble by raising interest rates back in 1999 – 2000 (despite the fact that corporate leaders said he was doing the wrong thing, that he should let the good times continue), he did not take into account unforeseen disasters. Yet unpredicted disaster was on us soon enough, in 2001, when the World Trade Towers fell to dust on 9/11, furthering the decline on Wall Street and in our economy.

So the big-money guys on Wall Street had to find another way to make the money they had been making during the High Tech boom, and when the government reduced interest rates in order to counter the effects of 9/11 and of Greenspan’s earlier decision to blow the High Tech stock bubble, the big-money guys saw that the housing market could be manipulated. They saw a way to make the money they used to make buying and selling High Tech stocks.

If Greenspan had taken unforeseen disaster into account when he decided to manipulate, pop, and blow the High Tech bubble, maybe the money and the money men would have stayed in the High Tech sector rather than moving on to manipulate home mortgages and subprime loans.

These guys in the government should know by now that if anything can go wrong, it will.

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October 28: A friend said, “Yeah, if Greenspan hadn’t popped the High Tech stock bubble, America would be a high-tech economy instead of a service economy.”