Hailed three years ago as ''the greatest central banker who ever lived,'' the retired chairman of the Federal Reserve now is being criticized for his management of the U.S. economy before he retired in 2006. The Fed's low rates and laissez-faire regulatory oversight during his final years are widely blamed for sowing the seeds of today's financial crisis - one that began in the U.S. housing market and is now battering banks, stock markets, borrowers and consumers around the world.

For much of his 18 years atop the world's most influential economic institution, Greenspan was lionized for the economy's performance. Now, he notes, he's being second-guessed for it.

''I was praised for things I didn't do,'' Greenspan said during one of three interviews at his sun-drenched office in downtown Washington, D.C. ''I am now being blamed for things that I didn't do.''

Now 82 years old, Greenspan wants to set the record straight before the ink dries on the first draft of the history of the financial crisis. The former Fed chief doesn't deny that he cares about his reputation. But the larger issue at stake, he says, is getting the lessons of the crisis right.

''The [wrong] evaluation of this period - and how to avoid the problems associated with it - will give you the wrong answers and the wrong policies,'' he says.

The scrutiny of Greenspan's record has taken on urgency now that the Bush administration and congressional Democrats are skirmishing over how to overhaul U.S. financial regulations. If Greenspan's critics prevail, then financial companies will likely face tighter oversight and less freedom in the products they offer. If Greenspan's views carry the day, the trend toward self-policing will continue. A repudiation of Greenspan's monetary policies could tempt the Fed to raise interest rates relatively quickly after the current crisis passes, and even attempt to deflate future bubbles with higher interest rates.

Greenspan says he doesn't regret a single decision. In his view, many critics are ignoring evidence in his favor and failing to assess the process by which he made decisions. The prevailing view among critics faults Greenspan on two main counts.

First, they say, his Fed lowered rates too much from 2001 to 2003 to cushion the economy from the bursting dot-com bubble. Then it took too long to raise them again. Low rates fueled mortgage borrowing, driving home prices to unsustainable heights.

Second, they say, the Fed was lax in its regulatory role. The central bank failed to press for stiffer rules for underwriting mortgages to people who ultimately couldn't afford them. Also, critics say, the Fed failed to anticipate banks' exposure to risky home buyers, leaving them with too little capital to absorb the eventual losses on those mortgages.

At the time, Greenspan expected his policy to boost housing because the rest of the economy was relatively unresponsive to lower interest rates. Based on decades of his own research, he believed a buoyant housing market would spur consumers to borrow against home values and spend more. This would not produce a housing bubble, he predicted, because it was difficult to speculate in homes and the memory of the 2000 tech-stock bust remained fresh.

Greenspan now admits he was wrong about the improbability of a housing bubble. Yet he has long maintained that bubbles are an unavoidable feature of a dynamic economy. He pulls out a 1999 speech and shows, underlined in green marker, passages in which he warned of recurring but unpredictable patterns of overconfidence followed by investor panic. He does not share some foreign central bankers' belief that their job is to defend against excessive asset-price inflation: No sensible policy, he maintains, could have prevented the housing bubble.

''I am reasonably certain that I am right here,'' Greenspan says. If proved wrong, he says, ''I will change. I do not have a vested interest in holding wrong ideas.'' When Greenspan left the Fed in January 2006, the economy was strong, inflation was low and prices of stocks and houses were buoyant.

But seeds of crisis began to germinate a few months later. Home prices stopped rising. House construction turned down. Delinquencies mounted on subprime mortgages, home loans made to borrowers who didn't qualify for, or weren't offered, regular mortgages. That triggered the collapse of several mortgage lenders and hedge funds.

In August 2007, the troubles spread to banks in Europe and the United States. In September, Greenspan released his memoir. As discussion of the book saturated newspapers and television, his successor, Ben Bernanke, delivered the first of six interest-rate cuts to date aimed at countering the crisis. The biggest question mark over Greenspan's record is his decision to slash interest rates to 1 percent in 2003 and wait to raise them until 2004, and then only slowly. In this debate, Greenspan and his critics seem to speak different languages.

Critics talk about the events that followed - an overheated housing market and a rapid buildup of debt on Main Street and Wall Street, much of which is now painfully unwinding. Such critics are now in the majority: In a recent Wall Street Journal survey of 55 economists, 84 percent said the Fed was too slow to raise rates. Two members of the policy-making Federal Open Market Committee at the time - William Poole and Robert Parry, presidents of the Federal Reserve Banks of St. Louis and San Francisco - have both recently argued that, in hindsight, rates were too low for too long.

Greenspan focuses not on events that followed the policy but on the thinking behind it. ''I don't remember a case when the process by which the decision making at the Federal Reserve failed,'' he says.

He says rock-bottom interest rates actually went against his ''19th century'' aversion to easy money.

''My inner soul didn't feel comfortable,'' Greenspan says. He justified the policy by noting that at the time, inflation was falling persistently and the risk of deflation - though small - seemed real, despite his prior assumptions that it was impossible with a dollar not linked to gold.

To prevent deflation, the Fed spurred growth by keeping interest rates low. At the time, he notes, the only dissenting votes on the Fed policy committee were those who wanted to set rates even lower. The Fed, he said, initially raised rates gradually to give businesses and investors time to prepare. In 2004 and 2005, it raised rates faster than private economists expected.