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The Age of Turbulence

Adventures in a New World

By Alan Greenspan

(51)

| Hardcover | 9781594201318

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Book Description

In the immediate aftermath of September 11, 2001, in his fourteenth year as Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, Alan Greenspan took part in a very quiet collective effort to ensure that America didn't experience an economic meltdown, taking the rest of the world with it. There was good reason to fear the worst: the stock market crash of October 1987, his first major crisis as Federal Reserve Chairman, coming just weeks after he assumed control, had come much closer than is even today generally known to freezing the financial system and triggering a genuine financial panic. But the most remarkable thing that happened to the economy after 9/11 was...nothing. What in an earlier day would have meant a crippling shock to the system was absorbed astonishingly quickly.

After 9/11 Alan Greenspan knew, if he needed any further reinforcement, that we're living in a new world - the world of a global capitalist economy that is vastly more flexible, resilient, open, self-directing, and fast-changing than it was even 20 years ago. It's a world that presents us with enormous new possibilities but also enormous new challenges. The Age of Turbulence is Alan Greenspan's incomparable reckoning with the nature of this new world - how we got here, what we're living through, and what lies over the horizon, for good and for ill-channeled through his own experiences working in the command room of the global economy for longer and with greater effect than any other single living figure. He begins his account on that September 11th morning, but then leaps back to his childhood, and follows the arc of his remarkable life's journey through to his more than 18-year tenure as Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, from 1987 to 2006, during a time of transforming change.

Alan Greenspan shares the story of his life first simply with an eye toward doing justice to the extraordinary amount of history he has experienced and shaped. But his other goal is to draw readers along the same learning curve he followed, so they accrue a grasp of his own understanding of the underlying dynamics that drive world events. In the second half of the book, having brought us to the present and armed us with the conceptual tools to follow him forward, Dr. Greenspan embarks on a magnificent tour de horizon of the global economy. He reveals the universals of economic growth, delves into the specific facts on the ground in each of the major countries and regions of the world, and explains what the trend-lines of globalization are from here. The distillation of a life's worth of wisdom and insight into an elegant expression of a coherent worldview, The Age of Turbulence will stand as Alan Greenspan's personal and intellectual legacy.

Critics

He's still looking after the pennies

At 61, Alan Greenspan, chairman of the US Federal Reserve Board and widely regarded as master of the financial universe, married for the second time and paid his first visit to Venice. Greenspan was, and is, a workaholic. His honeymoon was tagged on ... (read full critics)

guardian.co.uk published on Sat, 25 Sep 2010

Political currency examined

The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World by Alan Greenspan 531pp, Allen Lane, £25 Alan Greenspan is famously a libertarian Republican. He is also, it turns out, a Brownite, not a Blairite. In the autumn of 1994, shortly after Labour's leaders ... (read full critics)

guardian.co.uk published on Sat, 25 Sep 2010

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11 Reviews

5 people find this helpful

This is a book all investors, big or small, should read; it helps you understand how Fed operates and Greenspan's valuable comments on various areas of economic. Hence, I will not classify it as a biblography; rather, it is a book about economics.

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Divus Caesar said on Oct 1, 2007 | Add your feedback

3 people find this helpful

It's rather painful to see the man who's responsible for so much of the mess that we're in legitimizing his policies. He spent most of the pages attacking the current system yet he stayed mute while he was in office.
Insightful? Sure. Honorable? I don't know.
S

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Gabiq said on Sep 6, 2008 | Add your feedback

1 person find this helpful

A little more complicated then I thought it would be. I gave it a shot but I think I'll try it again soon.

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Ta Redington said on Feb 27, 2008 | Add your feedback

Three stars, that is the average between...

Five stars for the first half, one star for the second half...

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Kadath Dragon said on May 26, 2011 about the Paperback edition | Add your feedback

Inside Alan's brain

With the timing of a senior trader in financial markets, Alan Greenspan chose both the moment of his retirement and the publication of this memoir perfectly. This book was published when confidence in financial markets was slowly eroding, but had not yet led to the demise of Lehman, or the massive s ... (continue)

With the timing of a senior trader in financial markets, Alan Greenspan chose both the moment of his retirement and the publication of this memoir perfectly. This book was published when confidence in financial markets was slowly eroding, but had not yet led to the demise of Lehman, or the massive support actions for AIG and other financial institutions across much of the Western world (strangely, no Asian or Southern European institutions were affected).
As chairman of the Federal Reserve, Mr. Greenspan presided over the Great Moderation, one of the longest economic expansions in modern history. The self-proclaimed libertarian Republican shared a well-accepted opinion that we should allow for creative destruction as much as society accepts, as it is good for economic growth, which is good for society. With the tool-set of the neoclassical Chicago School he cared mainly about inflation and the money supply. Debt levels, exchange rates, and current account deficits are basically ignored, as markets will correct them automatically.
The book chronicles Mr. Greenspan's development from nerdy business economist to head of the FED with dozens of friends in high places, plus a description of those parameters of the global economy he deems important for the coming decades. The first part is relatively short and sympathetic. I found the part about his years at the helm of the FED somewhat disappointing. We learn little about the inner workings of this organisation of global importance, as if Mr. Greenspan was only busy with inflation and trying to convince the Washington political machine to implement healthy long-term economic policies instead of pork (Congress and the Bush Administration are not spared). The part about future developments is interesting, as we see Mr. Greenspan at work, fitting real world developments into his theoretical framework. Compared to an article in the FT or the Economist, it is a relatively slow and somewhat cumbersome process, but depending on how well you read the financial press, you may find more or less new information here.
However, in 2010 we cannot but see this book in light of the developments of 2008 and 2009. In later interviews Mr. Greenspan has expressed his “shocked disbelief” in the behaviour of those playing the markets (his nerdy character has definitely been a disadvantage here, and I doubt if he had put so much trust in markets had he been experienced as a trader or a banker).
While Mr. Greenspan thought he could keep interest rates low and the money supply high at the same time, because globalisation and Chinese factory workers kept inflation in check, an 800-pound gorilla was maturing right under his eyes: the easy availability of money reduced the returns on traditional financial instruments and was an important reason for investors to accept high risk propositions (and it also reduced the rational for saving by private citizens). Mr. Greenspan argued that "real" prices of financial assets cannot be known, which is true to a large extend, but turned lethal .
Mr. Greenspan expanded his benign neglect to financial market supervision, where risky behaviour was slowly creating the conditions for an old-fashioned Kladeradatsch. He states in his book that supervisors cannot assess a counterparty as well as other market participants, a claim he does not substantiate. A supervisor has an asymmetric information advantage versus market participant, who base themselves on upon reading financial statements, credit value at risk calculations, and ticking boxes like “under supervision [Y/N]”. Only the number and quality of staff (which is partly based upon the salaries the supervisors pay) can give supervisors the disadvantage. Given his trust in market participants’ common sense and long-term outlook, the FED did not advocate any restrictions on mortgage quality requirements, executive pay structures or centralised clearing of standardised over-the-counter derivative trades.
So all-in-all it is an interesting book, but overtaken by a new reality that you can find explained much better by the likes of Paul Krugman (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/06/magazine/06Economic-t.html?_r=2&em=&pagewanted=all) or William White (http://ineteconomics.org/sites/inet.civicactions.net/files/INET%20C%40K%20Paper%20Session%201%20-%20White.pdf).

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Hermes said on May 4, 2010 | Add your feedback