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





Format: Paperback, 608pp.
ISBN: 9780143114161
Publisher: Penguin Books
Pub. Date: September 9, 2008

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Description and Reviews
From The Publisher:

In the immediate aftermath of September 11, 2001, in his fourteenth year as Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, Alan Greenspan took part in a very quiet collective effort to ensure that America didn't experience an economic meltdown, taking the rest of the world with it. There was good reason to fear the worst: the stock market crash of October 1987, his first major crisis as Federal Reserve Chairman, coming just weeks after he assumed control, had come much closer than is even today generally known to freezing the financial system and triggering a genuine financial panic. But the most remarkable thing that happened to the economy after 9/11 was...nothing. What in an earlier day would have meant a crippling shock to the system was absorbed astonishingly quickly.

After 9/11 Alan Greenspan knew, if he needed any further reinforcement, that we're living in a new world - the world of a global capitalist economy that is vastly more flexible, resilient, open, self-directing, and fast-changing than it was even 20 years ago. It's a world that presents us with enormous new possibilities but also enormous new challenges. The Age of Turbulence is Alan Greenspan's incomparable reckoning with the nature of this new world - how we got here, what we're living through, and what lies over the horizon, for good and for ill-channeled through his own experiences working in the command room of the global economy for longer and with greater effect than any other single living figure. He begins his account on that September 11th morning, but then leaps back to his childhood, and follows the arc of his remarkable life's journey through to his more than 18-year tenure as Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, from 1987 to 2006, during a time of transforming change.

Alan Greenspan shares the story of his life first simply with an eye toward doing justice to the extraordinary amount of history he has experienced and shaped. But his other goal is to draw readers along the same learning curve he followed, so they accrue a grasp of his own understanding of the underlying dynamics that drive world events. In the second half of the book, having brought us to the present and armed us with the conceptual tools to follow him forward, Dr. Greenspan embarks on a magnificent tour de horizon of the global economy. He reveals the universals of economic growth, delves into the specific facts on the ground in each of the major countries and regions of the world, and explains what the trend-lines of globalization are from here. The distillation of a life's worth of wisdom and insight into an elegant expression of a coherent worldview, The Age of Turbulence will stand as Alan Greenspan's personal and intellectual legacy.



Reader's Index 
Send us your favorite quotes or passages from this book.

• "The notion of enlisting representatives of a corporation’s various stakeholders on the board—unions, community representatives, customers, suppliers, and so forth—has a nice democratic ring to it. But it is ill-advised and I strongly suspect it will not work. Today’s highly competitive world needs each corporation to execute plans from a single coach, as it were. A vote by the whole team on each big play is a recipe for defeat. I assume that eventually some of the more abrasive edges of Sarbanes-Oxley, especially Section 404, will be honed down.” Pg. 432


About the Author

Alan Greenspan was born in 1926 in the Washington Heights neighborhood of New York City. After studying the clarinet at Juilliard and working as a professional musician, he earned his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. in Economics from New York University. In 1954, he co-founded the economic consulting firm Townsend-Greenspan & Co. From 1974 to 1977, he served as Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Gerald Ford. In 1987, President Ronald Reagan appointed him Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, a position he held until his retirement in 2006.


Table of Contents

	Introduction	1
1	City Kid	19
2	The Making of an Economist	38
3	Economics Meets Politics	54
4	Private Citizen	77
5	Black Monday	100
6	The Fall of the Wall	123
7	A Democrat's Agenda	142
8	Irrational Exuberance	164
9	Millennium Fever	182
10	Downturn	206
11	The Nation Challenged	226
12	The Universals of Economic Growth	249
13	The Modes of Capitalism	267
14	The Choices that Await China	294
15	The Tigers and the Elephant	311
16	Russia's Sharp Elbows	323
17	Latin America nad Populism	334
18	Current Accounts and Debt	346
19	Globalization and Regulation	363
20	The "Conundrum"	377
21	Education and Income Equality	392
22	The World Retires. But Can it Afford To?	409
23	Corporate Governance	423
24	The Long-Term Energy Squeeze	437
25	The Delphic Future	464
	Acknowledgements	506
	A Note on Sources	508
	Index	513

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