Finance »The great irony of success«Seite 3/3

ZEIT: The banking system has lost a lot of trust. What can be done to restore that trust?

Greenspan: Banks have been operating at too low a capital margin. Largely they construct their capital requirments on the basis of data from the euphoria period of the business cycle when yield spreads, risk, and defaults are low. Yet we need the capital not for those periods, but during a recession when fear is dominant and credit pressures are high. So the issue is this: Rather than deciding which particular structured investment vehicle is dangerous one should solve the problem more generally by having far higher capital. Then you can take large losses without having to immediately go to the market to reestablish capital levels.

ZEIT: The Euro has risen steadily. Can it become the world’s foremost or one of the two foremost reserve currencies?

Greenspan: Some decades ago people thought the world could maintain only one international currency. But now we have so much more liquidity, there is no reason we could not have more than one. The Euro has already become a competing international currency, not so much in the form of central bank reserves, but through private holdings. In the private sector, the Euro is only a couple of percentage points behind the dollar, even adjusted for changes in exchange rates.

ZEIT: The weights of the world economy move East, do they not?

Greenspan: Certainly. One reason is demographics. Another is that the East Asian countries can borrow technology and have productivity growth two to three times what we have in the United States. If East Asian countries maintain open markets, their share of world GDP will rise for the next 20 years.

ZEIT: With severe political consequences.

Greenspan: The expansion of global forces is a positive development, not a negative. We have taken hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. This process benefits us all.

Interview: Matthias Nass

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