Alan Greenspan Rocks the Boat

Posted on September 19, 2007

Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan lets down his hair in his new memoir, The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World. In the book he says everyone knows the Iraq War was just for oil, that Bush has a profligate spender who never met a spending bill he didn't love and whose entire economic policy is driven by politics and that Bill Clinton was incredibly well-informed about just about everything. Oh, and he blasts his old friend Dick Cheney for saying that deficits don't matter, because they really, really do.

Greenspan says in the new 531-page book, "The Bush administration turned out to be very different from the reincarnation of the Ford administration that I had imagined. Now, the political operation was far more dominant."

He also says, "Little value was placed on rigorous economic policy debate or the weighing of long-term consequences."

Snap! Greenspan also said that Hillary Clinton wouldn't make a bad president, which is interesting. But the most personally revealing snippet of the book is where Greenspan described his first date with his wife. Instead of asking her back to his home to see his etchings, he asked her back to his pad to read his latest economic paper. He actually read it to her, presumably while she adoringly gazed at him in her best Nancy Reagan imitation.