Oct
31
Was Alan Greenspan Motivated by Politics More Than Economics?
By
Alan Greenspan in his New York office, 1974. CreditJohn Sotomayor/The New York Times
THE MAN WHO KNEW
The Life and Times of Alan Greenspan
By Sebastian Mallaby
Illustrated. 781 pp. Penguin Press. $40.
In 1959, at the annual meeting of the American Statistical Association, a 33-year-old economist named Alan Greenspan argued that central banks should beware of letting financial markets get too comfortable. The Federal Reserve’s success in smoothing economic fluctuations in the 1920s, he said, had led to the dangerous belief that “the business cycle is dead.” The crash and depression that followed were “inevitable” consequences of that cavalier attitude toward risk…
Was Alan Greenspan Motivated by Politics More Than Economics?
