If we had only known that was not going to work! I think he was applying the standard remedy for an oncoming recession, and if he hadn’t I bet lots of people would be wondering why we need such over the top remedies today. Also, I don’t think anyone knew back then what a bad shape the credit markets and people like AIG were in. So, I think you might be right in hindsight. Greenspan had the luxury of prosperity to work with, and so he had a lot more flexibility - if only his ideological blinders allowed him to see what was really going on.
Greenspan is one of the big culprits. Go back to late 1996 and the “irrational Exuberance” speech. He failed to pop the bubble then, eased off when he should have tightened (blamed the Asia crisis and the Russia meltdown) which enabled the dot bomb bubble, then allowed housing to bubble so as to engineer a soft landing from there. Instead of taking the pain back in 96 & 97, we had a decade of “soft landings” that set us up for the crash of the greatest Ponzi scheme in history.
We are at the end of the beginning and not the begging of the end for this crisis.