Alan Greenspan

Finishing up this book. Good to keep my business degree dusted off mentally - good mental exercise in general, economically.

Bob Woodward is pretty liberal, and some bias comes out. Clinton and Rubin are, of course, such thoughtful perceptive people; Ford, Reagan and Bush had no interest in "working with" the Fed - just a greedy self-interest...

As always, in this kind of book, some good zingers about how the Fed has more influence over the economic markets than Congress or Pennsylvania Avenue.



Here was a good one to balance politically my recent love for U2 and Bono.

When Greenspan was questioned by the House for bailing out a hedge fund for the super-rich investors, a socialist representative said this: "According to the United Nations, Mr. Chairman [Greenspan], the world's richest 225 individuals have a combined wealth of over $1 trillion, equal to the bottom 47 percent of the world's population - 225 people have as much wealth as almost half the world's population. Does that concern you? Do you think that that is just?"

Greenspan: "It is not by any means clear to me that if you were somehow to take these 225 invdividuals and merely indicate to them that they no longer have any wealth, and you put them away on a desert island, that the state of the rest of the world would be improved in the slightest."

Woodward: "Greenspan believed that only structural change, capitalism, the rule of law and the creation of private property ownership would lift up the world's poor."

Greenspan: "I think we ought to, instead of looking at what we have now as some incredibly corrupt, unequal, unethical system, try to look at what the United States has become relative to what used to exist 100, 200, 300 years ago.... The average American is far better off than at any time in our history."



Most of the book wasn't this political, but just revolved around Greenspan's leadership of the Fed - getting the several board members to vote as unanimously as possible with his position, to give the markets confidence that the Fed knew what it was doing.

Anyway, I'm trying to get down to one leisure book and one church/theology/ministry book at a time, and I'm almost there now! This was a good change of pace.