The world economy is looking up, former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan told a Tokyo forum today, people who attended the meeting told Bloomberg News.
Greenspan, who was addressing the Nomura Research Institute session via satellite from Washington, never mentioned the word recession, according to Anne Okko, who works in funding administration at Nordic Investment Bank.
Greenspan told the gathering that the switch of some nations from central planning to market economies has created a period of high growth and low inflation, according to Vaseehar Hassan Abdul Razack, chairman of Kuala Lumpur-based RHB Islamic Bank Bhd, and that is creating demand at U.S. companies such as Microsoft Corp. Vaseehar added that Greenspan said he isn’t particularly worried about the U.S. subprime mortgage crash because such loans are only a small part of the economy.
“The change in his view highlights how changeable sentiment has been since the start of the year,” Glenn Maguire, chief Asia economist at Societe Generale SA in Hong Kong, told Bloomberg. “He seems more optimistic that the world economy can provide support to the U.S.”
