1. Former chairman of the Federal Reserve Alan Greenspan used the term “irrational exuberance” in 1996 to describe the high levels of optimism among stock market investors at the time. Stock market indexes, such as the S&P Composite Price Index, were at an all-time high, and the stock market kept rapidly rising in the late 1990s, generating what came to be recognized as a bubble in technology stocks. Some commentators believed that the Fed should have intervened to slow the expansion of the economy at that time. Why would central banks ever want to clamp down when the economy is growing rapidly? What policies could the government and the central bank use to slow down an economic expansion?