Alan’s gloomy vision

Former Federal Reserve Chief Alan Greenspan has some wisdom to offer lawmakers attempting a sweeping financial regulation overhaul: Good luck with that.

In a report that he’s expected to present today at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank, Greenspan said that the new regulations being ginned up won’t necessarily prevent another economic collapse.

He also defended decisions to keep interest rates low during the early 2000s while he was running the Fed, and said that there’s little evidence that low rates helped fuel a housing boom — and then an epic bust.

“Unless there is a societal choice to abandon dynamic markets and leverage for some form of central planning, I fear that preventing bubbles will in the end turn out to be infeasible,” wrote the former Fed chief. “Given history, we believed that any declines in home prices would be gradual.”

Once known for his sage financial punditry and his verbal flourishes, the former Fed chief’s remarks come a day after he was conspicuously absent from a House Financial Services Committee hearing on financial regulatory reform. Current Fed boss Ben Bernanke, along with Paul Volcker, another former Fed chief who’s now an economic adviser to President Obama, testified at the hearing.

In the Brookings report, entitled “The Crisis,” Greenspan advises that requiring banks and other financial firms to raise as much as 40 percent more in reserve capital is one of the best ways to prevent another bout of Wall Street exuberance. mark.decambre@nypost.com