Alan Greenspan has hit back at critics who blame the Federal Reserve under his leadership for causing the US housing bubble by keeping interest rates too low for too long in the early 2000s, saying the evidence of any link between monetary policy and the bubble was “statistically very fragile”.

Writing in the Economists’ Forum on FT.com, Mr Greenspan says he is “puzzled” why so many commentators seek to explain the US housing bubble in terms of Fed actions when many other economies with different central banks and different monetary policies also saw rapid house price gains.