Clues about The Future, Courtesy of Alan Greenspan

If we want to understand what the Federal Reserve might do in the future, we need to look to the past.

In an email on Thursday, Neil Dutta at Renaissance Macro highlighted a 2004 speech from then-Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, who explained the Fed's rationale for cutting interest rates in 1998 amid a Russian debt crisis but an apparently strong and sound US economy.