The man who knew alan greenspan
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The Man Who Knew
Synopsis
Alan Greenspan was appointed by Ronald Reagan to Chairman of the Federal Reserve, a post he held for 18 years. He presided over an unprecedented period of stability and low inflation, was revered by economists, adored by investors and consulted by leaders from Beijing to Frankfurt.
Both data-hound and eligible society bachelor, Greenspan was a man of contradictions. His great success was to prove the very idea he, an advocate of the gold standard, doubted: that the discretionary judgments of a money-printing central bank could stabilise an economy. He resigned in , having overseen tumultuous changes in the world’s most powerful economy. Yet when the great crash happened only two years later many blamed him, even though he had warned early on of irrational exuberance in the market place.
Sebastian Mallaby brilliantly shows the subtlety and complexity of Alan Greenspan’s legacy. Full of beautifully rendered high-octane political infighting, hard-hitting
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Aside from the Great Depression, Alan Greenspan&#;s tenure at the Federal Reserve may be the most studied period of U.S. central banking as measured by the number of academic and popular books written about the period. Sebastian Mallaby&#;s new book, The Man Who Knew: The Life and Times of Alan Greenspan, joins a number of Greenspan biographies that include Steven Beckner&#;s Back from the Brink (New York: Wiley, ), Justin Martin&#;sGreenspan (Cambridge, Mass.: Perseus, ), Bob Woodward&#;s Maestro (New York: Simon and Schuster, ), Jerome Tuccille&#;sAlan Shrugged (Hoboken, N.J.: Wiley, ), and Frederick Sheehan&#;s Panderer to Power (New York: McGraw Hill, ), as well as, of course, Greenspan&#;s autobiography, The Age of Turbulence (New York: Penguin, ).
The Man Who Knew stands out from these previous works by offering the most comprehensive and detailed biography of Greenspan to date. Mallaby delivers an exhaustive and intimate biography of Greenspan that traces the p
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The Man Who Knew: The Life and Times of Alan Greenspan
Sebastian Mallaby. Penguin Press, $35 (p) ISBN
Alan Greenspan, who served as chairman of the Federal Reserve from to (the second longest tenure in history), is revealed in this biography to have been neither the fabled maestro who mastered inflation nor the reviled incompetent who failed to anticipate the Great Recession. According to Mallaby (More Money than God), a Financial Times contributing editor, he was a formidable analyst and forecaster, but one whose laissez-faire philosophy allowed unregulated derivatives and “shadow banking” to proliferate and culminate in the financial crisis. Mallaby also explores one of Greenspan’s less appreciated talents, possibly the one where his real genius lay: a canny instinct for political survival. Mallaby’s treatment of Greenspan’s life is thorough, balanced, and well-informed (due no doubt in part to Greenspan’s cooperation). A less judicious (or more commercially minded) biogr