The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World
Author(s):
Alan Greenspan
Label: Penguin (Non-Classics)
Publisher(s):
Penguin (Non-Classics)
Studio: Penguin (Non-Classics)
Manufacturer: Penguin (Non-Classics)
Binding: Paperback
List Price: $17.00
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Editorial Reviews
Product Description
The Age Of Turbulence is Alan Greenspan?s incomparable reckoning with the contemporary financial world, channeled through his own experiences working in the command room of the global economy longer and with greater effect than any other single living figure. Following the arc of his remarkable life?s journey through his more than eighteen-year tenure as chairman of the Federal Reserve Board to the present, in the second half of The Age of Turbulence Dr. Greenspan embarks on a magnificent tour d?horizon of the global economy. 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.
Amazon.com Review
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.
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Customer Reviews
Lapdog/Houseboy For The Robber Barons
Intellectual, yet robber-baron partisan. I was horrified by Greenspan's book. He views 'income disparity' as the difference in income between skilled and unskilled labor. What the fu is he writing about?! He thinks that the supply of skilled labor in this county is artificially low. His solution to our problems would be to lower incomes for skilled labor. As an economist, he should know that only the incomes of MDs have kept up with inflation since at least 1972.
I would expect an economist to advocate legislation that would bolster free enterprise rather than foster a caste system. We need laws to discourage monopolist behavior and the milking of corporations by opportunist CEOs. Greenspan never addressed the corruption and failed to write a word regarding the crimes of big business.
Finally, Greenspan favors big coal, big nuclear, et al. rather than solar or wind power. I gather that his robber-baron buddies can not corner those markets.
Not your typical Washington memoir
I have to agree with the statements found on the back of the paperback--this is not your typical memoir from a Washington insider. Not that I can say exactly what the typical Washington memoir would be; I can say this is not it. This book is an analysis of the modern world through the eyes of a man who has seen it transition from one dominated by central planning, to one dominated by deregulation and free trade, to one that is at the brink of we know not what.
I say "we know not what" because it is unclear which way the world will shift in the coming years. Greenspan has his ideas, and he lays them out in his Epilogue (which I can only guess is the new chapter he wrote for the paperback edition). There are many reasons why you can agree with him, and likewise, many reasons why you shouldn't. Either way, at the end of the book, you can at least see where he is coming from. And this is a testament to how well the book serves its purpose: to understand and explain the world from Greenspan's perspective.
Of course, to reach this end, Greenspan has to put the reader in his shoes and in typical autobiographical fashion, this requires him to tell us who he is, where he came from, how he got here, and who the major influences in his life were. Unlike the typical autobiography, though, at the halfway point, Greenspan shifts the focus away from himself and puts it on the world around us. He then explains what he sees as our major challenges and proposes what he believes are the best solutions.
By the time you get to these points in the book, you can clearly see where Greenspan is coming from and you can understand why he proposes the solutions he does. This doesn't mean that all of his proposals are necessarily persuasive. It also doesn't mean that you don't have to suffer through the usual autobiography foibles. There is still the usual self-aggrandizement typical of the autobiographical genre, and Greenspan doesn't miss any opportunity to drop a famous name as his "friend."
Nevertheless, Greenspan takes a number of fascinating facts, combines them with an accessible analysis, and presents a series of insights that are worth contemplating, especially given the unending crisis of recent months. Whether Greenspan will prove prescient or not only time will tell. After all, he totally missed the housing and technology bubbles, and in neither case does he fully explain this lack of foresight in the book (although he does suggest a few reasons). But as the world moves forward, likely in a different direction, it is clear to Greenspan that if we take the wrong turn, we could repeat some of the darker times of the 20th century. For this reason, his analysis and conclusions are worth perusing.
Age of Disturbulence
Greenspan lends his wisdom through his vast experiences as FED chairman in this book. He expounded on the difficulty of handling the U.S. financial affairs which is often compounded by the ever interfering politics. Politics as shown was frequently obstructing good economic policies. Vested interest by politicians in order to please their constituents often frown upon fiscal deficit cuts that Greenspan is insistent in pursuing. And whenever economic czars are seated to the contrary of their agenda, the latter are replaced by those who are in conformity with the status quo. It clearly depicts how the FEDs are not entirely independent in their decision making. Strings are being pulled from behind to veer them towards what the government wants. And in the end, if the economy screwed, people blamed the FEDs as the culprits. On account of lowering interest rates which Greenspan is famous for in pump priming the economy, he is recently being blamed for triggering the mess in the sub-prime leading the economy now to one of it's darkest moments.
Do we really need a federal reserve???
The American public has put too much credence in the opinions of economists: the one clear take home message from this book is that the economy is truly too complex for anyone (including Alan Greenspan) to understand and predict with regularity. By his own admission, he was raising and lowering interest rates without a clear ability to predict the effects of his actions. Well......if he didn't know what he was doing.....could anybody??? And if the effects of his (and others) actions are truly unknown...should people be permitted to artificially raise or lower interest rates at which the fed reserve loans money??? I think not!!!! Why not let the market decide??? This authority of the fed to control interest rates is the ultimate irony, considering Greenspan's libertarian bent and beliefs that free markets should prevail.
The inability of even the best economists to be right with regularity is demonstrated by reading Bernanke's or Greenspan's thoughts about our own economy published within the last year!!!! Incredible how wrong they were. Not their fault, however...it's too complicated for anyone to predict (read The Black Swan and Fooled by Randomness for more on this topic).
Notwithstanding the prior comments, Greenspan really has written an excellent book extolling the benefits of free markets, property rights, and the forces of globalization. They reinforce my belief in the future importance of the company [...], which facilitates the tremendous forces (division of labor) driving globalization. They also reinforce my optimism in the future of America.
Greenspan reveals, but not too much
This book has three parts. First, Alan Greenspan tells us about his background, schooling, associations, intellectual influences, and business career. Then he tells us about his public life, from unpaid campaign aide to Nixon in 68 to chairman of the Federal Reserve for 18 years, ending in 2006. Finally, he explains his economic thinking, and how he envisions the world through 2030.
The first part is lively. We see him as a young man playing the saxophone professionally in a big band before falling in love with math and later econometrics, while hanging out with people like Ayn Rand. Contrary to what the Times' critic is quoted as saying on the back cover, Alan Greenspan does not gossip. The people we meet in his autobiography are there for their influence on his thinking.
What stands out about his involvement in government is his assessment of the 8 US presidents he interacted with, from Nixon to Bush-43, and the two that come out on top are Gerald Ford and Bill Clinton, the latter for his steady focus on economic policy.
One requirement of his job as chairman of the Federal Reserve was to make long-winded, cagey public pronouncements that would meter out a calculated dose of information without spooking the markets. Greenspan himself calls it "fedspeak," and, while the first two parts of the book are free of it, the third is written in it.
There are paragraphs you have to read several times to understand whether he expects a particular metric to go up or down. "Significantly" and "perceptibly" are used so often you end up skipping over them, and everything is impersonal. Translated into fedspeak, "Chinese workers keep prices down by accepting low wages" becomes "There is disinflationary pressure due to low labor costs." His most quoted phrase "irrational exuberance" is described as just happening, not as anything anybody felt.
If Greenspan has any reservations about the validity of metrics like the GDP, the CPI, or the Dow-Jones, he does not share them with the reader. I wish he had.
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