Former Federal Reserve chair Alan Greenspan, meanwhile, continues to defend his record overseeing the US economy in the years leading up to the financial crisis. On Wednesday, Greenspan appeared before the bipartisan Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission. Greenspan was questioned for ignoring repeated warnings over the subprime mortgage boom and unregulated derivatives. Greenspan said he thinks he was wrong “30 percent of the time.”

Alan Greenspan: “When you’ve been in government for twenty-one years, as I have been, the issue of retrospective and figuring out what you should have done differently is a really futile activity, because you can’t, in fact, in the real world, do it. I think — I mean, my experience has been, in the business I was in, I was right 70 percent of the time, but I was wrong 30 percent of the time. And there are an awful lot of mistakes in twenty-one years.”

Commission member Brooksley Born, the former head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, said Greenspan’s stewardship of the Fed had led the US into the financial meltdown.

Brooksley Born: “The Fed utterly failed to prevent the financial crisis. The Fed and the banking regulators failed to prevent the housing bubble. They failed to prevent the predatory lending scandal. They failed to prevent our biggest banks and bank-holding companies from engaging in activities that would bring them to the verge of collapse without massive taxpayer bailouts. They failed to recognize the systemic risk posed by an unregulated over-the-counter derivatives market, and they permitted the financial system and the economy to reach the brink of disaster.”

Born had openly clashed with Greenspan during the 1990s over his refusal to back regulation of the derivatives market.