Tom Harkin: “the minority staff of the Joint Economic Committee prepared some charts that I think are illustrative of what has been…”

“the minority staff of the Joint Economic Committee prepared some charts that I think are illustrative of what has been wrong with Mr. Greenspan's leadership at the Federal Reserve. The first chart simply shows the speed by which the Federal Reserve lowered rates. I already went over that chart. I am going to put that back up because it goes with these other charts. Again, this first chart shows the speed at which the Federal Reserve reduces interest rates to get us out of recession. Going all the way back to 1957, the Fed acted very strongly to reduce interest rates. But in 1990, coming out of that recession, Chairman Greenspan did not act decisively and, thus, interest rates stayed abnormally high. Here is another chart. Let's see how fast the economy recovered. This is sort of the flip side of that last chart. This shows the growth of payroll employment from the bottom of the recession compared to those previous years going back to World War II. So here is the bottom of the recession; here is coming out of it. In the previous seven recessions, we see employment gaining rapidly. In fact, the average of the past seven, in the first 2 years after the depth of a recession, we have employment gains of over 7-percent growth. What happened after the 1990 recession? Here is Mr. Greenspan: We had no growth, no growth for almost 13, 14 months; negative growth.…”