Word: greenspans
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...your family and all that, but boy, this holding the world economy by the hand is even better than advertised. The phone rings. Maybe it will be like this summer, when your mom picked up in your house on Cape Cod and found Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan on one line and worried Russian reformer Anatoli Chubais on the other. Oh, how she thrilled over that! The phone rings, and because you are the Deputy Secretary (and happen to be one of the few rocket-scientist economists not trying to create a black box to make deviously complex trades on Wall...
...late-night phone calls, in marathon meetings and over bagels, orange juice and quiche, these three men--Robert Rubin, Alan Greenspan and Larry Summers--are working to stop what has become a plague of economic panic. Their biggest shield is an astonishingly robust U.S. economy. Growth at year's end was north of 5%--double what economists had expected--and unemployment is at a 28-year low. By fighting off one collapse after another--and defending their economic policy from political meddling--the three men have so far protected American growth, making investors deliriously, perhaps delusionally, happy in the process...
...meant some very difficult decisions. In some of the nations devastated by the crisis, there is a growing anti-U.S. backlash, and politicians such as Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad complain that Rubin, Greenspan and Summers--and their henchmen at the International Monetary Fund--have turned nations like Malaysia and Russia into leper colonies by isolating them from global capital and making life hellish in order to protect U.S. growth. The three admit they've made hard choices--and they'll even cop to some mistakes--but they still believe that a strong U.S. economy is the last, best...
...initial downturn didn't surprise the Fed or the Treasury too much. For the better part of two years, Greenspan and Rubin had been quietly fretting about the narrowing "spread"--the difference in interest rates--between U.S. bonds and emerging-market bonds. By 1996 banks were lending money to countries such as Malaysia at interest rates just a few percentage points above what the U.S. Treasuries commanded. The implication: Malaysia was not a much riskier bet than the U.S. This was nonsense, and the committee knew some correction was in order...
...three men trying to cope with these mid-ether collisions of dollars and expectations are an unlikely team. Greenspan, the data-loving analyst with government roots sunk back into the financial and moral chaos of the Nixon Administration, and a shaman-like power over global markets. Rubin, the Goldman Sachs wonder boy who ran the firm's complex and dangerous arbitrage operations and then led it to rocket-ship international growth. And Summers, the Harvard-trained academic who is invariably called the Kissinger of economics: a total pragmatist whose ambition sometimes grates but whose intellect never fails to dazzle...