What did Alan Greenspan concede?

From all the hullabaloo I thought he had granted the death of capitalism but no.  Here are his prepared remarks.  Here is part of the Q&A.

He did admit that risk models had failed by selectively overweighting periods of euphoria and that the credit default swaps market had exploded in our face.  He also knows that there are hundreds of trillions of dollars in open positions in other derivative markets and most of them have worked relatively well in this crisis; his words indicated as such.  He also stressed that capitalism has had a string of forty years of numerous successes and that recent experience is an outlier.  He is still not sure what to make of the current failure.

Greenspan also said: “Whatever regulatory changes are made, they will pale in comparison to
the change already evident in today’s markets,” he said. “Those markets
for an indefinite future will be far more restrained than would any
currently contemplated new regulatory regime.”

His policy recommendation was the modest one of requiring banks to keep a share in any mortgage.

I don’t agree with all of his detailed points (e.g., too much emphasis on subprime securitization), but I thought the overall ideological "flavor" of his remarks was essentially correct.  For differing, and yet not totally different, point of view, here is John Quiggin on Greenspan.  Here is the Ayn Rand Center on Greenspan.

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