When he was chairman of the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan's inscrutable style became the model for central bankers around the world.
Now retired and with a book to promote, he clearly feels free to be a little less Delphic. In two interviews published yesterday in the Financial Times and Daily Telegraph, he warned that house prices in the US have further to fall, and that they will soon start dropping in Britain as well.
That certainly grabbed the headlines. But it is what Greenspan has to say about the outlook for the medium term that ought to ring alarm bells.
Faced with a crisis, he became famous for cutting interest rates until the situation stabilised - a tactic grateful traders christened "the Greenspan Put".
Today the Fed, under his successor Ben Bernanke, is expected to have recourse to 
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Time to face up to the gravity of the crisis
