Existing comment:
Alan Greenspan
2008
Bronze, Edition 4/5
Alan Greenspan (1926-) was first appointed Chair of the Federal Reserve by President Reagan in 1987 and held the position until his retirement in 2006. In 2008, in the midst of the global financial crisis -- the deepest economic crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s -- the House Oversight Committee summoned Greenspan for an explanation. The 82-year-old economist said in his own defense, "[t]hose of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholders' equity, myself included, are in a state of shocked disbelief."
In sculpting the aging face of Alan Greenspan wearing impossibly large glasses, Oliphant exaggerates a well-known iconographic attribute for poor sight and lack of vision in every sense, assigning blame to Greenspan for failing to foresee the crisis and use his authority to regulate the irresponsible lending practices that caused it. Greenspan looked, but did not see, the problem with unregulated capitalism. |