Word: woodwarding
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...Know thyself Don't let the Washington Post inform the world that you once regurgitated on your classics professor--get the bad news out before Bob Woodward does. Spin it your way. "When I was young and irresponsible, I was young and irresponsible...
...books on Greenspan give the subject little attention. In Maestro: Greenspan's Fed and the American Boom (Simon & Schuster; 270 pages; $25), author Bob Woodward briefly notes that for a while Greenspan claimed "impotence about the stock market while doggedly trying to influence it." Woodward comes back to the subject only briefly to conclude that Greenspan ultimately gave up on such a strategy because the market is just too unpredictable...
...also said stock prices have a lot to do with inflation, which he targets daily. Justin Martin, author of Greenspan: The Man Behind Money (Perseus; 284 pages; $28), neatly points out that this is "a rather too fine distinction." But he spends even less time than Woodward probing the matter and then mysteriously concludes that such a strategy wouldn't work anyway. Millions of people have come to believe that Greenspan purposely moves stock prices. They're wrong, according to both authors. Yet we get no proof...
...come to appreciate how brilliantly Greenspan manages the Federal Open Market Committee--the body that regularly meets and votes to set interest rates. We also get a revealing taste of the heavy politics involved and how Greenspan quietly and effectively shuffles through the most powerful ranks in Washington. Woodward, assistant managing editor of the Washington Post, makes a case for Greenspan's almost single-handedly engineering the prosperous 1990s. And his assertion that Greenspan sometimes literally gets a pain in the stomach as an early warning to problems not yet evident--"the body knowing something before the head"--is priceless...
...that light it's good to have both works. Woodward picks up where Martin stops. That two books can look at the same figure with little overlap and leave readers thirsting for more testifies to Greenspan's immense stature. He moves markets with a sneeze, and so takes pride in being the king of obfuscation. These books help us know him better, but we still have...