12 August, 2012

Alan Greenspan

Alan Greenspan on His Fed Legacy and the Economy - Businessweek:

The demand for buildings has gone down by almost half. We are essentially operating two different economies in the United States. One produces short-term assets like food, equipment, and software and typically accounts for about nine-tenths of the GDP. And that’s been doing tolerably well. Not great. By itself, that level of activity, if we could measure it, is operating at the equivalent of approximately a 6 percent rate of unemployment. The other tenth of the GDP is comprised of assets with a life expectancy of more than 20 years, mainly buildings. That segment of the economy has been cut almost in half. That’s a reduction of 4 percentage points in overall economic output and a comparable rise in the unemployment rate.