The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World | Alan Greenspan

The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World | Alan Greenspan | eye opener

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The Age of Turbule...

	The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World Alan Greenspan Penguin Press HC, The, 2007 - 544 pages average customer review:based on 232 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

What he thinks

Some of the best books are written by people at a stage of their lives where they speak their mind... This is one of them. I didn't like everything he said but I like that he did say it.

It's mostly autobiographical. His choices, education, and worklife experiences make interesting reading.

He reviews the presidents he's worked with. Gives his opinons on growth and the world economy. Talks about politics and having to try to avoid saying anything that could be used by either political side. He makes a case for the FED to stay independent...

The last two chapters were hard to swallow. He talks about how inovation increased productivity, and it's the main driver for the last few years. He does not touch on the subject of stagnant wages or the levels of real income. Does not mention loose lending standards or how that may have goosed the economy... It raises the question as to if the events are too current and he can't say anything negative or was he really out of touch... I hope its the former. If it's the latter, he may be blamed for the credit crisis and it'll stick.

I guess he missed something here... Even if the government can balance the budget... What's to keep the banks from lending it all away and then the goverment having to pickup the tab??? Right?

It's a good book, well written, and he's an interesting character even though he's never been know as flashy...

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eye opener

Some good information from a Republican, like Iraq war was about oil. Like the Bush administration spent more money on earmarks in 6 years that we have spent in at least 20. So much for fiscal conservatives.

A Peek behind the Curtain at the Wizard!

The Age of Turbulence is engaging, fascinating and educational. Watching Greenspan on television in the Senate Sub Committee meetings was interesting...but tough to know who the man behind the curtain was. This book opens the curtain and lets us see a motivated individual who is confident of his skills, but doesn't flaunt it.

In the first part of the book Alan Greenspan does an exceptional job of explaining what makes him tick and provides a peek into the world of the Fed Chairman. In the second part he talks about various parts of the world and spices it with a bit of crystal balling.

It is clear that Alan Greeenspan has strong Critical Thinking and Decision Making skills. He has been succeeded in many of his adventures. As with all humans he has his weaknesses as well. His honest candor in the book made it refreshing and useful.

There are some great topics in the book that let us get to know Alan Greenspan. Some of these are: City Kid, The Making of an Economist, Black Monday, The Fall of the Wall, Irrational Exuberance, Millennium Fever and Downturn. The second half of the book has equally excellent subjects: The Choices that Await China, The Tigers and the Elephant, Russia's Sharp Elbows, Latin America and Populism, Globalization and Regulation, The World Retires, Bit Can it Afford To, the Delphic Future an more.

Overall the book is insightful and a great read!

One final thought: I found that Age of Turbulence coupled with Revolutionary Wealth by Alvin and Heidi Toffler help to provide a look into possible futures and what we can do to make a great one for ourselves!

The Re-Discovery of Common Sense: A Guide to: The Lost Art of Critical Thinking

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Exhuberance

It was expected that The Age of Turbulence would be a good read, but I found more. It was textbook on Greenspan's life and times and, although I was never overly taken with him as Chairman, I was a real fan by the time I finished his book.

A good argument for free markets

The Age of Turbulence is a good argument for free markets, against various restraints on freedom: regulation, tariffs, economic populism, laws that do not protect property rights, and uneven enforcement of property laws. Greenspan is a true believer in free markets, and makes good arguments in favor of them.

I enjoyed reading the first 248 pages because I remember most of this history and it gave new perspectives and details to add to my memories. This part is reasonably well written and mostly free of Fed Speak. The last half of the book was a chore to read, but generally worth the effort. An example of tedious prose (Fed Speak) is on page 352, "Since 1995, the greater rates of productivity growth in the United States (compared with still-subdued rates abroad) apparently produced correspondingly higher risk-adjusted expected rates of return that fostered a disproportionate rise in the global demand for U.S.-based assets."

Greenspan lives in a contradiction that he apparently does not recognize. On one hand, he believes that a gold standard currency would be ideal because it would curb the growth of the money supply and would be immune to politics. (page 391) On the other hand, he thinks the Fed should be frequently tweaking interest rates to provide the `desired' amount of liquidity. These tweaks don't curb the growth of the money supply as well as they could, because the money supply is not the objective. Regulating inflation and growth is the objective.

I was stunned by Greenspan's failure to foresee that tax receipts would plunge in 2001 because taxes on capital gains dried up (pages 213-224). The stock market started going down, so investors were having capital losses instead of capital gains, so tax receipts went down. Greenspan's reaction was "Shazam! Who'd have thunk of that?" Did he think that we would always have very high capital gains to be taxed? Did he just overlook this?

Greenspan believes there is a high degree of honesty in business: "a flagrantly unscrupulous used-car salesman is one who will be out of business before long." (page 252) How does he know that?

Greenspan tends to find one single fact that characterizes a country's economy, or is the root of a problem. America's economic problem is a lack of workers who are skilled in math and science. The reason that we lack these skilled workers is that we do not allow enough of them to immigrate to America and we do not pay math and science teachers enough. (Well, I know, those are two facts.) The problem with the Latin American economies is populism. The problem with India's economies is too much regulation. There are many more of these. You might like knowing what the biggest problem is, or you might suspect there is more complexity than that. This is Greenspan's memoir - he doesn't have a lot of new research on what is the biggest problem with the economy of (fill in the blank country). But you knew this was a memoir, so you can't be disappointed.

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