Investors bearish on Wall Street flocked to Main Street. The stock bubble of the late 1990s became the housing bubble of the 2000s, with this significant difference: For all its popularity since the early 1980s, the stock market is still the playing field of the rich. Not so real estate. Close to 70 percent of Americans own their own homes. As the Economist noted in its first warnings of a housing bubble four years ago, "construction, the buying, selling and renting of properties and the imputed benefits to owner-occupiers account for around 15 percent of rich countries' GDP." In other words, what happens in the real estate market affects just about everyone in a way that stock market fluctuations don't.

The housing bubble did just that. National wealth soared. Then the bubble burst. The economy is hurting again. Greenspan, it turned out, did not end the 2001 recession. He deferred it. The result may be a far more severe downturn than if the Federal Reserve had been more prudent with interest rates. Yet here is Greenspan in his new memoir, shifting all blame for current economic troubles, including the consequences of the housing bubble, either on President Bush or on unscrupulous lenders. He wants us to believe that his policies had nothing to do with creating the bubble after 2001.

There's plenty of blame to go around for the mismanagement of the economy since 2000. Paul O'Neill, President Bush's first treasury secretary, described in detail in 2004 how Bush was uninterested in economic policies or fiscal prudence, let alone in vetoing spending bills or regulating the mortgage industry. As treasury secretary, O'Neill warned Bush and on occasion spoke publicly about the spending abandon he was witnessing. Bush fired him in December 2002.

Greenspan was more respected, more famous and more powerful than O'Neill. He could say two words and move markets wildly. His influence on public policy was profound. His public influence on Bush could be equally so. He chose not to use it. Instead, he publicly supported the Bush tax cuts without once saying what he now writes in his memoir: That the tax cuts unbalanced by spending restraint were reckless. "I'm just very disappointed," he told The New York Times in an interview published Monday. "Smaller government, lower spending, lower taxes, less regulation -- they had the resources to do it, they had the knowledge to do it, they had the political majorities to do it. And they didn't."

But Greenspan was among the administration's biggest enablers. He had a bully pulpit. He didn't use it. The convenience of after-the-fact correctives may help fashion the kind of image Greenspan wants to draw about his legacy. It doesn't change the bipolar economy he helped fashion after 2001 -- an economy once high on the housing bubble, now going more sour by the week, with no bottom yet in sight.

Ironically, Ben Bernanke, who replaced Greenspan as chairman of the Federal Reserve in 2006, today chairs a meeting of the Fed to decide whether to drop interest rates again in the face of unrelenting bad economic news. He should not perpetuate the cycle of Greenspan idolatry.