There are no significant economic reports on the calendar today, and the afternoon's 3yr Treasury auction is the lease relevant of the week.  Against such a backdrop, unscheduled phenomena like corporate debt issuance and news headlines will have an outsized effect on rates.  So it's a fine time to step back and hurl some incredulity at previous Fed chairmen. 

I don't assume Alan Greenspan will probably read this commentary, but if so Alan, feel free to jump in the comments section and fire back.  The rest of this commentary will be addressed directly to you.

I've seen several of your more newsworthy comments on the current state of markets and the economy in the wake of your tenure and they haven't been that great.  Perhaps you're looking farther into the future than I assume you were in February when you said Greece would be leaving the Eurozone.  But to be fair, I certainly don't think we've eclipsed the time frame in which such a thing could happen, so we'll leave that discussion on Greece for a future date and instead talk about a different discussion on Greece.

Remember when you said the US was like Greece because we issued too much Treasury debt?  Kinda silly.  Greece is only Greece because of the Euro.  Otherwise, no drama.  In that same convo, you also said that swap spreads were the canaries in the coal mine for our borrowing capacity, yet they've been almost perfectly steady ever since.  You also said rates would soon be rising, but instead, they've pretty much only been falling. 

Now, you're at it again.  Boy, that makes a great headline!  I'm sure a lot of old people and a few young people will read the story and actually think it means something.  The fact is, big bursting bubble calls are always heavy on conjecture.  More dangerously here, you call on some ideal that mixes conventional wisdom with "the past" to ostensibly guide us to the truth.  

The more recent past has shown that old people (and a few young people) who have attempted to apply conventional wisdom learned over the past 30 years have all been sorely burned by reality. 

So when you say “What ultimately will determine where it goes is to reach back and to ask ourselves where is the normal interest rate?” forgive me if I say, "huh?"  How could anyone 'reach back' into the past and pull out a "normal interest rate" from something that has been trending thusly?

The point is, you don't know.  But neither does anyone else.