The definitive biography of the most important economic statesman of our time

Sebastian Mallaby’s magisterial biography of Alan Greenspan, the product of over five years of research predicated on untrammeled access to his subject and his closest professional and personal intimates, provides into vivid focus the mysterious point where the federal government and the economy meet. To comprehend Greenspan’s story is certainly to start to see the financial and political landscaping from the last 30 years–and the presidency from about The Man Who Knew: THE LIFE SPAN and Moments of Alan Greenspan Reagan to George W. Bush–in a whole new light. As the most influential financial statesman of his age, Greenspan spent an eternity grappling having a momentous shift: the transformation of finance through the fixed and controlled program of the post-war period to the free-for-all of days gone by quarter century. The story of Greenspan is also the story of the producing of modern finance, for good and for ill.

Greenspan’s life is normally a quintessential American achievement story: elevated by a single mother in the Jewish émigré community of Washington Levels, he was a math prodigy who discovered a niche like a stats-crunching consultant. A grasp at explaining the economic climate to captains of sector, he translated that skill into advising Richard Nixon in his 1968 advertising campaign. This resulted in a perch within the White colored Home Council of Economic Advisers, and to a stunning array of business and federal government roles, from which the path towards the Given was relatively very clear. A fire-breathing libertarian and disciple of Ayn Rand in his youngsters who once known as the Fed’s creation a historic mistake, Mallaby displays how Greenspan reinvented himself as a pragmatist once in power. In his analysis, and in his primary mission of keeping inflation in check, he was a maestro indeed, and hailed as such. At his retirement in 2006, he was lauded as the age’s necessary man, the veritable God in the machine, the global economy’s avatar. His memoirs offered for record amounts to publishers all over the world.

But then emerged 2008. Mallaby’s tale lands with both foot on the fantastic crash which did so much to harm Alan Greenspan’s reputation. Mallaby argues that the traditional wisdom is normally off bottom: Greenspan wasn’t a naïve ideologue who thought greater legislation was unnecessary. He previously pressed for greater legislation of some crucial areas of finance over the years, and had received nowhere. To argue that he didn’t know the dangers in irrational marketplaces is to skip the stage. He knew more than almost anyone; the question is why he didn’t respond, and whether anyone else could or would have. A close reading of Greenspan’s lifestyle provides fascinating answers to these queries, answers whose lessons we’d do well to heed. Because perhaps Mallaby’s very best lesson is certainly that economic statesmanship, like political statesmanship, is the art from the possible. The Man Who Knew is a looking reckoning using what specifically comprised the artwork, and the feasible, in the profession of Alan Greenspan.