And that’s the same thing the Japanese policymakers faced. They took interest rates down, short-term interest rates down to near zero. We’re going to do the same thing here.

Cory Bortnicker: Mm-hmm.

Kevin Depew: And it took a long time. Because even when you disincentivize savings, the psychology behind the deflation was so strong and so entrenched that it still didn’t do enough until there was enough time that had passed for people to begin spending again. I don’t know when that’s going to be. I don’t know how -- I’m not smart enough to be able to predict when that might be. But I do know that all the Federal Reserve can do, all policymakers can do, is try to make credit available. And they’ve been doing that and they’ll continue to do that. But, again, we don’t have the cushion of consumption and savings that they did, and ours is going to be more severe in many respects.

Cory Bortnicker: Well, one person who was also, I guess, surprised about how deeply we’ve entered into this crisis was Alan Greenspan, who last week was really grilled by Congress. And I wanted to bring him up because I wanted to get a sense from you about just how responsible is Greenspan for where we are today?

Kevin Depew: Well, Alan Greenspan, I’m sure, in many respects is far more intelligent and knowledgeable about all of these things than I am. So, you know, the perspective that I look at this from is, what must we think socionomically? What must be the psychology behind whether we’re praising Greenspan or pillorying him the way they were on Capitol Hill last week? I mean, he was grilled -- it was brutal. You almost felt sorry for the guy.

My opinion is that it doesn’t matter who was in charge of the Federal Reserve, they were going to behave in the same way. If Ben Berneke had been Federal Reserve Chairman during the Alan Greenspan tenure, his policy would have been the same as Alan Greenspan’s. If Alan Greenspan were Federal Reserve Chairman now, his policy would be the same as Ben Berneke’s, for all intents and purposes.

That’s the -- the whole thesis behind the Central Bank, their whole foundation for what they do is that they believe they can use their ability to expand credit to bring us out of recessions and to control the economy.

Cory Bortnicker: Well, let’s talk about that for a second. Because is Alan Greenspan’s position -- if he were to be in Ben Berneke’s position like you said that he was today, would he really be acting in the same way? Because -- or is it sort of the philosophy that Greenspan had, looking about how the market was a very self-correcting force? Is that very different from Berneke’s perspective?

Kevin Depew: Well, here’s the --

Cory Bortnicker: Or do we not know, because Berneke is --

Kevin Depew: No, I think --

Cory Bortnicker: -- where he is today?

Kevin Depew: I think we do know, because this is the -- in a sense, this is outrageous -- that Alan Greenspan is going to go before Capitol Hill and say that he believes that the market is a self-correcting force, because every policy, everything that he did as Federal Reserve Chairman was, at every point possible, to circumvent the market’s price discovery mechanism.

So when you had the Long-Term Capital mManagement debacle, the year 2000,the dot-com crash, and on and on and on, all monetary policy was designed to circumvent market price discovery. He can say, "Yeah, I believe the free market would work itself," but what they mean, what any central banker means when they say that the free market should be allowed to work is that it should work on the upside, but we’re here to inject money and expand credit to make sure that on the downside, no one ever gets hurt. Which is impossible.That’s why we are where we are right now. And it doesn’t matter if it’s Alan Greenspan or any central banker. They’re all going to do the same thing.

What I find interesting is that there were these -- there were all the magazine covers around the time of 2000 and 1999. You know, there was this famous magazine cover that I believe Time produced called “The Committee to Save the World,” and it featured Alan Greenspan, and the then Treasury Secretary Bob Rubin, and somebody else. I don’t even remember who the other guy was. And then you had the book, you know, “The Biography of Alan Greenspan,” crediting him as being the maestro of the markets.