WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Making it easier for poorer Americans to get mortgages didn't push the country into crisis but Wall Street's drive to package the loans into opaque securities helped do so, former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan said on Wednesday.
In prepared remarks for delivery to a congressionally appointed panel investigating causes of the devastating crisis that wracked the country from 2007-2009, Greenspan renewed a defense of his own legacy by denying the U.S. central bank helped inflate housing prices with excessively low interest rates.
"The house price bubble, the most prominent global bubble in generations, was caused by lower interest rates but...it was long-term mortgage rates that galvanized prices, not the overnight rates of central banks, as has become the seeming conventional wisdom," Greenspan said.
(Reporting by Glenn Somerville, Editing by Chizu Nomiyama)
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