When Alan Greenspan was at the height of his influence as Fed chairman, the financial news network CNBC would film him arriving for Federal Open Market Committee meetings and focus on the size of his briefcase. According to the Briefcase Indicator, if the briefcase was thin it meant that Greenspan's mind was untroubled and the economy was doing well. If it was full, it meant he had been burning the midnight oil and a rate hike loomed. Greenspan never pointed out that the choice of case was dictated by whether he had packed his lunch but then, he was never one to let that stop the media watching him surveying the market. Why let the facts get in the way of a good story?

His new autobiography The Age of Turbulence still has him playing that role. As always, Greenspan has a passion for shedding a light on data and making counter-intuitive assertions. How else would you explain the first date with his wife where they talked about monopolies and where he asked her back to his apartment to look at an essay he had written on the subject? Indeed, he was so engrossed in Fedspeak that he had to propose to her five times and even then, he put off the honeymoon until it could be held at the tail end of an international monetary conference in Interlaken, Switzerland. As you do. And when the love-struck couple finally ended up strolling through Venice, he turned to her and asked: "What is the value-added produced in this city?"



Still, apart from one or two terminological glitches, most of the language here is clear. His insights into past US Presidents are interesting, if somewhat unsurprising. He speaks warmly of Gerald Ford ("A secure man, with fewer psychological hang-ups than almost anyone I'd ever met") and Ronald Reagan ("He brought a sunniness and benevolence to the presidency that never wavered, even when he had to deal with a dysfunctional economy and the global danger of nuclear war. Stored in his head must have been four hundred stories and one-liners; while most of the were humorous, he was able to tap them instantly to communicate politics or policy"). He regards Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton as "by far the smartest presidents I've worked with", although he found he could not serve Nixon and went off consulting on Wall Street. He had absolutely no illusions about Nixon. When a member of the Clinton administration accused Nixon of anti-semitism, Greenspan replied: "You don't understand. He wasn't exclusively anti-Semitic. He was anti-Semitic, anti-Italian, anti-Greek, anti-Slovak. I don't know anybody he was pro. He hated everybody."

Interestingly, he condemns the Bush White House for running up deficits and bribing voters with tax cuts and he makes clear that while he had been around for a long while, he was not part of the inner circle. Still, that didn't stop him accepting re-appointment for a fifth term.

On the question of subprime, Greenspan shows the kind of let-the-market-forces-rip mindset that allowed it to turn into a political and economic crisis. "The gains were especially dramatic among Hispanics and blacks, as increasing affluence as well as government encouragement of subprime mortgage programs enabled many members of minority groups to become first-time home buyers. This expansion of ownership gave more people a stake in the future of our country and boded well for the cohesion of the nation".

And he is scathing about Sarbanes-Oxley and the focus on corporate governance. Audit committees, he says, cannot uncover wrongdoing without employing a vast army of investigators and "independent" directors have very little experience of the business they are appointed to oversee. "Overall, Sarbanes-Oxley is proving unnecessarily burdensome, but just as important, it is premised on certain myths about what level of governance is achievable."