The many lessons of The Man Who Knew

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/infi.12106
• Date: 01 June 2017
• Published date: 01 June 2017

DOI: 10.1111/infi.12106

BOOK REVIEW

The many lessons of The Man Who Knew

Peter R. Fisher

Center for Business, Government & Society, Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth

THE MAN WHO KNEW―THE LIFE AND TIMES OF ALAN GREENSPAN

Sebastian Mallaby

Penguin Press, New York, 2016

Sebastian Mallaby ambitiously sets out to accomplish three tasks in one book. He draws a portrait of

Alan Greenspan the man. He chronicles more than half a century of history and Greenspan’s

corresponding career as a private analyst and public servant. He also offers a lesson for future central

bankers on the importance of giving sufficient weight to financial stability, not just price stability, in

setting interest rates.

The Man Who Knew is an impressive achievement and an impo rtant piece of scholarship that

both deserves and rewards th e careful reader. The footnotes alone are worthy of th eir own treatment,

containing not only citatio ns to Mallaby’s extensive p rimary research and intervi ews but also a

running subtext of Mallaby’s c ommentary on Greenspan and on mu ch of the relevant economic

literature.

The reviewer is daunted, left mostly to quibble over emphasis and inference.

The portrait is finely drawn , one many of us will both recognize and learn from. The ch ronicle is

a brilliant rendering of key mom ents in recent economic and fina ncial history that provides the

context needed to appreciate Gree nspan’s extraordinary mixed le gacy. Mallaby’s lesson is an

important one but his focus is mo re on the morality tale of Greenspa n ignoring his own youthful

insights and not enough on wh y and how central banks can a ctually apply Greenspan’sinsightsand

Mallaby’s lesson. Fortunate ly for us, The Man Who Knew provid es many more important insig hts

than Mallaby could possibly c hoose to highlight. Future central bankers ignore Mal laby’svolumeat

their peril.

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GREENSPAN THE MAN

Mallaby’s portrait presents Greenspan as a man of complexity and contradictions, at times sphinxlike

and at others disarmingly candid. He is capable of indecipherable utterances and of a famous ‘bedside

manner’that charms and beguiles.

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He works with both jazz legend Stan Getz and disgraced President

Richard Nixon.

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He is an intensely private man who becomes the most famous and powerful economist

on the planet.

Mallaby also lets us see an intensely political Greenspan, spinning and flattering reporters, and

congressmen.

3

We see Greenspan working on Richard Nixon’s 1968 presidential campaign, besting

Henry Kissinger at bureaucratic combat in the Ford administration and escaping with his fiscal and

forecasting virtues mostly unscathed from entanglements with President-elect Reagan’s true-believing

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© 2017 John Wiley & Sons Ltd wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/infi International Finance. 2017;20:210–220.