If the financial crisis came from America, one of its main instigators was Gordon’s friend and adviser

A crucial part of Gordon Brown’s plan for getting away from the financial crisis with his reputation enhanced is to treat it as something nasty that blew in off the Atlantic. Brown is desperately hoping that the public will be persuaded by this line and that this will allow him to dodge questions about his weakening of the regulatory structure, the huge levels of debt in the economy and the extent to which he let the City do whatever it wanted because it was covering up the economic failings of the rest of the country.

But someone needs to ask Brown about role his friend Alan Greenspan, chairman of the Federal Reserve from 1987 to 2006, played in creating this crisis. It was Greenspan’s decisions which ensured that the stock market bubble was replaced by an asset bubble, it was Greenspan who opposed any efforts to regulate derivatives and it was the Greenspan