NuclearPhynance Archive

Disclaimer: I did search on both 'Alan Greenspan' and 'Age of Turbulence' prior to posting this thread. Came up with nothing significant. So, at the risk of reproducing the already stated:



For holiday reading, started Greenspan's Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World and am enjoying it so far. Seems to cover a  nice combination of some favorite subjects. For example, am still in early parts (just got to Nixon in 1968) and prior to that  there is a certain modernist perspective. But Greenspan seems to acknowledge this view and points towards more interesting chapters later.



Thoughts?

I've finished it about 2 months ago. I thought the first half was a very enjoyable read. Informative, insightful and easy to read.



The second half was a bit more dull and, while interesting from a macro-economic perspective perhaps, I found it rather slow. I wish he had expanded more upon the historical details of the first half.



What I thought particularly humorous that for all his "we know what we are doing, trust us" rhetoric during his tenure, the book is full of comments like "we had had no idea how this was going to pan out", "we were flying blind", "we didn't really know how to react", etc.

So, it's an honest biography I think and makes him all the more likeable.



I would give the first half 4 out of 5 stars and the second half 2 out of 5 stars.

4 stars out of 5 for both halves.  I took away an impression that he emphasized the empirical aspects more than I ever imagined, as opposed to theory.  His long history of measurement and observation made the latter half more interesing for me, as he projected forward from the time of writing with more credibility than when I opened the book.  Worth reading.  Too bad he didn't comment much (if any) on some current Presidential candidates he would have come across.

I bought this a few months back, got thru the pre-Clinton stuff, but the writing is not that great. What I did like is the reminder that life in the past decades was pretty tricky and nobody knew quite how to get the macro moving back on the right track.



Instead I have received 'Money kept rolling in [and out]' on Argentina, reads faster, got me focused on a few things.



And besides that? Holiday reading is 'Beyond Putnam', writing is not great but it is a lot of fun, and something on computational group theory, for fun. Thank you Foyles.

I just started reading it.  I hope he goes over his thoughts on taking us off the gold standard...

I tend to agree with FDAXhunter: I enjoyed the biographical elements moreso than the air-y predictions of the future (not that they weren't insightful).



It was good reading (along with Rubin's book) for me to catch up on some recent, first-hand economic history being a relatively young fellow. Probably onto 'Power and Plenty: Trade, War, and the World Economy in the Second Millennium' after Rebonato and Taleb.