ALICE RIVLIN POSES A SIMPLE QUESTION FOR UNCLE AL

Alan Greenspan has been pretty busy trying to salvage his reputation as a central banker but a lot of people aren't buying into his defenses.

Volcker Stands Tall, Greenspan Keeps Shrinking
Commentary by Caroline Baum

April 9 (Bloomberg) -- Greenspan's curriculum vitae includes two asset bubbles (one in Internet and technology stocks in the late 1990s, another in residential real estate), a pair of banking crises, a boatload of fraudulent lending he chose to ignore, and a household savings rate of zero.

Greenspan is desperate to deflect the blame for a credit crisis he called ``the most wrenching'' in 50 years. He can write his autobiography, which he did last year, but he can't write his epitaph. We, the public, will do that.

He wrote an op-ed for the Financial Times on March 18 (``We will never have a perfect model of risk'') that generated such an outpouring of criticism he had to write a follow-up.

Alice Rivlin, who served as a Fed governor under Greenspan, was one of those who responded to Greenspan's misplaced assertion that econometric and risk models were to blame.

``We will never have a perfect model of risk in a complex economy,'' she wrote. ``But the culprit was not imperfect models. It was a failure to ask common sense questions,'' such as ``will housing prices keep going up forever?''