Word: greenspans
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...They may not finish one another's sentences, but they clearly can finish one another's thoughts. And there is tremendous camaraderie. "Let me tell you this about Alan's tennis game," jokes Summers, an occasional opponent on the court. "He is very good [pause] for his age." Says Greenspan, with a broad grin designed to mask what is either sarcasm or a psych job: "Larry is really almost as good as a professional player...
...Greenspan has a theory about what holds them together: "In analytical people self-esteem relies on the analysis and not on the conclusions." That must be it. The three men have a mania for analysis that has bred a rigorous, unique intellectual honesty. In the Reagan Administration economic policymaking was guided not by analysis but by conclusions--specifically a belief in so-called supply-side economics. No matter what the data showed, the results among Reagan-era economists like Arthur Laffer were always the same: tax cuts and less regulation were the solution. Rubin, Greenspan and Summers have outgrown ideology...
This pragmatism is a faith that recalls nothing so much as the objectivist philosophy of the novelist and social critic Ayn Rand (The Fountainhead, Atlas Shrugged), which Greenspan has studied intently. During long nights at Rand's apartment and through her articles and letters, Greenspan found in objectivism a sense that markets are an expression of the deepest truths about human nature and that, as a result, they will ultimately be correct...
...fresh thinking has been crucial in the new economic order. One legacy of 1998 has been the destruction of some of academe's and Wall Street's most cherished models of the world. More data and faster markets, says Greenspan, mean more opportunities to make money. They also mean more chances to lose your shirt, something he calls "the increased productivity of mistakes." Computers make it possible to push a button and destroy a billion dollars of wealth. The chairman was warning about the problem long before Long-Term Capital Management vaporized $4 billion, but that debacle silenced any skeptics...
Summers, who was the youngest tenured professor in Harvard history, was every bit as much a rocket scientist as the economists at LTCM. But Greenspan says one of the keys to Summers' success in Washington is his ability to unlearn much of what he once taught. "Larry has one overriding virtue: he is very smart," Greenspan explained one afternoon last week, as a springlike day cooled into night outside his Washington office. "And unlike people who are smart and believe they are smart, he is open to the recognition that a lot of what he thinks is true...