Maestro: Greenspan's Fed and the American Boom

In eight Tuesdays each year, Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan convenes a small committee to set the short-term interest rate that can move through the American and world economies like an electric jolt. As much as any, the committee's actions determine the economic well-being of every American. The availability of money for business or consumer loans, mortgages, job creation and overall national economic growth flows from those decisions. Perhaps the last Washington secret is how the Federal Reserve and its enigmatic chairman, Alan Greenspan, operate. In Maestro, Bob Woodward takes you inside the Fed and Greenspan's thinking. We listen to the Fed's internal debates as the American economy is pushed into a historic 10-year expansion while the world economy lurches from financial crisis to financial crisis. Greenspan plays a sometimes subtle, sometimes blunt behind-the-scenes role. He appears in Maestro up close as never before -- alternately nervous and calm, plunging into mathematics one moment and politics the next, skeptical, dispassionate, always struggling -- often alone.

Maestro traces a fascinating intellectual journey as Greenspan, an old-school anti-inflation hawk of the traditional economy, is among the first to realize the potential in the modern, high-productivity new economy -- the foundation of the current American boom. Woodward's account of the Greenspan years is a remarkable portrait of a man who has become the symbol of American economic preeminence.

Amazon.com Review
Bob Woodward called his biography of Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan Maestro for two reasons. First, Greenspan is a musician. He started out as a Julliard-trained jazz sax man. "He wasn't a good improviser," Woodward reports. And while the other guys got stoned all night, Greenspan "read economics and business books and eventually became the band's bookkeeper." He also cultivated powerful pals, like Ayn Rand, whose coterie dubbed the dour young man "The Undertaker."

More profoundly, Greenspan is a maestro, a conductor, exquisitely attuned to every instrument in the political and economic orchestra. He rules by consensus, but with a firm hand and notoriously inscrutable words. Marvelously, Woodward relates that Greenspan had to propose twice to his wife, the violinist-turned-TV news star Andrea Mitchell, before she understood: "His verbal obscurity and caution were so ingrained that Mitchell didn't even know that he had asked her to marry him." Woodward gives us the inside story of what Greenspan really thinks and how he outmaneuvered the most ruthless politicians on earth in some of the hairiest times imaginable, from the 1987 stock market crash to the 1994-95 Mexican crisis to the stomach-churning turn of the century. It turns out that for all his awesome knowledge of monetary minutiae, the Fed chief literally relies on "a pain in the pit of my stomach" to make decisions. "At times, he found his body sensed danger before his head," writes Woodward. The Fed chief also adapts Einstein's technique to economics, hunting for discrepancies as keys to deeper theories. Einstein made breakthroughs out of bent light; Greenspan deduced productivity gains that government statisticians had overlooked for years. (The gains appeared when Greenspan made the statisticians calculate productivity by business sector, the way it's done in the real world.)

Woodward's prose is cool and rational, not exuberant. But if you're into economics and politics, you'll find a rich gossip trove here. Who knew Reagan had a draft of a presidential order to shut down Wall Street trading at hand in 1987? Scary! Reading Maestro is better than sitting with Greenspan in his famous tub as he charts your future--it's like being right there inside his head. --Tim Appelo

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All Customer Reviews
Average Customer Review:
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:

A precise time, 2008-11-11
I think that this book is very useful in the time we are living now. It show how the economy, especially the north american, but also the rest of the worl works. How the lack of responsability of what you offers to the market can destroy the market itself, and that, somehow must be supervise by some kind of goberment. anyway very interesting book.The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money


2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

Intellectual Cover for a Corrupt Monetary Cartel, the Federal Reserve, 2008-03-10
~Maestro: Greenspan's Fed and the American Boom~ is a rosy bit of economic subterfuge heralding Greenspan as an economic saviour when in reality we're paying the price for the Federal Reserve's inflationary scheme throughout the 1990s. If the markets set interest rates, we wouldn't see the vicious cycles of boom and bust, the subprime mortgage crisis, and the housing bubble. But such subversion is always attendant to fractional-reserve banking. A wiser more honest Alan Greespan wrote an essay entitled 'Gold and Freedom' in the 1960s. Therein, he observed: "In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation... The financial policy of the welfare state requires that there be no way for the owners of wealth to protect themselves. This is the shabby secret of the welfare statists' tirades against gold. Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the confiscation of wealth. Gold stands in the way of this insidious process. It stands as a protector of property rights. If one grasps this, one has no difficulty in understanding the statists' antagonism toward the gold standard." Greenspan intuitively knew this was still true when Rep. Ron Paul of Texas grilled him in hearings before the House Banking Committee.

People can mock the alarmists and goldbugs, but the U.S. Dollar is poised to fall over a precipice of hyperinflation in the twenty-first century. For years, it has enjoyed prestige as the reserve currency of central banks and reserve currency for OPEC exchange, but it is steadily starting to unravel. Too much public sector indebtedness, a 10-trillion dollar debt, trillions in unfunded federal liabilities, and an aging workforce will all point to American economic decline. In the 1990s, almost 65-70% of U.S. Dollars in existence were in circulation abroad. There is no telling how much it is today. The results will be catastrophic if a shockwave hits, and those Dollars come back home in mass. It doesn't necessarily entail a 1929 crash, but it will likely result in economic stagnation where inflation surpasses real economic growth and/or near-double-digit unemployment.

There is nothing special about Greenspan. He had wisdom to get out and find a fall guy in the new Federal Reserve Chief Ben Bernanke. Bernanke will take the hit for his mistakes. Bernanke is afraid to do any needed correction, or surgery in the form of tightening monetary policy, and will continue to prime-pump the economy and foment an inflationary shockwave and economic stagnation. The cure for inflationary woes is always more inflation. It's a melancholy fate, and the market correction will be devastating. His career will be short-lived and he will be the scapegoat. John Keynes, hardly a model economist, was prescient nonetheless when he observed: "By a continuous process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. By this method, they not only confiscate, but they confiscate arbitrarily; and while the process impoverishes many, it actually enriches some....The process engages all of the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner that not one man in a million can diagnose."

"The central bank is an institution of the most deadly hostility existing against the Principles and form of our Constitution. I am an Enemy to all banks discounting bills or notes for anything but Coin. If the American People allow private banks to control the issuance of their currency, first by inflation and then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the People of all their Property until their Children will wake up homeless on the continent their Fathers conquered."
--Thomas Jefferson


0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

Amazing book about Fed's work in layman's terms, 2008-02-25
After reading this book I realized how fascinating a book can be when it is written by a washington insider like Woodword. Amazing book describes Greenspan, Fed, Whitehouse and the economics and politics behind it in the most lucid manner possible.

Very true in nature expresses very candidly Chairman Greenspan's political manuevering and how Whitehouse makes a non political instituion political.

Excellent and much more interesting to read compared to Mr. Greenspans own auto biography which in itself is a very good book.


0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:

"The nurturing of capital and property ownership.", 2007-09-10
The coziness of our nations politically elite always makes for interesting reading. While there are some interesting tidbits throughout, i.e. Alan Greenspans association with Ayn Rand; the familiar names of the politically entrenched and the precarious state of our nation's economic machinations, this book was a bit boring. With that said, there were two things I found fascinating about D.C. life. First, there is an extremely strong current of Ivy League uber-ambition in our nation's capital; along with an extraordinary confluence of academic uber-achievement (PhD's lawyers & double majored PhD's). Second, I didn't know Alan Greenspan, along with his longtime and classy arm-charm Andrea Mitchell, were such savvy political operatives on the so called D.C. cocktail circuit or what a critical role socializing played in the running of our country. Other than that, I was a bit disappointed with this effort.


0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:

Jared Wizner's Review of Maestro, 2007-08-18
Among collegiate literature which I have been exposed to, I have found Bob Woodward's Maestro to be one of the most informative and educational. With this simple and easy to understand narrative, I have been taken inside the doors of the Federal Reserve, and have been given a picture of how the FOMC truly operates. I feel more equipped to discuss and express opinion towards the operations of the Fed. Upon the completion of this book, I sat back with a sense of gratification, in my newly acquired, practical understanding of the U.S. economy. Woodward was able to portray Monetary Policy in a sense that really applied to my level of thinking.
With an inside look at the decisions of Alan Greenspan and his role as chairman of the Federal Reserve, I was stuck with a sense of amazement watching this man operate mathematically and politically, still maintaining a sense of pure awareness and concern for the long-term affects of his resolutions. I would definitely recommend this book to any reader in search of a practical and realistic understanding of the economic engine which drives the U.S.

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