Word: greenspan
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With his carefully cultivated image as a wonk, Greenspan has been heard to say that he is a prop in the long-running political theater that is Washington. But he is also clearly an actor--one of Washington's shrewdest power brokers. He plays politics just as he plays his favorite sport, tennis, in which he is known on occasion to switch his racquet from his right hand to his left in the middle of a point to avoid using his weaker backhand. So it was that during the 1990s the onetime adviser to Presidents Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford...
Ironically, much of Greenspan's success is attributed to his obsession with data and his uncanny ability to obfuscate. Known around Washington as Greenspeak, his signature style is marked by drawn-out, cryptic statements on the economy that leave listeners alternately impressed and befuddled. "His style of speaking reflects his style of thinking--careful, very nuanced, analytically driven and balanced," says a Fed official...
...qualms about Greenspan are dwarfed by fears of what will happen in January when his term as a Fed governor expires. Most Fed watchers agree that Greenspan has done a superb job of shepherding the economy, especially since he has had to contend with two major stock-market corrections, assorted global financial crises, a rash of corporate scandals and 9/11. An economy's success is tied to confidence, and Greenspan has made believers out of marketmakers and policymakers...
Almost by definition, his successor and the economy over which he or she presides will start off at a disadvantage, especially if Greenspan fails to steady the rocky economy in the months ahead. Some Fed watchers are worried that the President might pluck from corporate America a CEO with little formal finance background to run the Fed, as he did with John Snow at Treasury. The most likely candidates, though, are Martin Feldstein, a Harvard professor and former head of President Reagan's Council of Economic Advisers (CEA); Glenn Hubbard, dean of Columbia Business School, who ran the CEA during...
...obviously has a very tough act to follow, in more ways than one. "In the short term, he did wonders for the U.S. economy, but now we are saddled with the bill," says Ravi Batra, an economist at Southern Methodist University and author of a new polemic, Greenspan's Fraud: How Two Decades of His Policies Have Undermined the Global Economy. That's a harsh verdict. But if Alan Greenspan misses the universal acclaim he once enjoyed, he may have only himself to blame. It was Greenspan, after all, who famously warned about the perils of irrational exuberance...