The Man Who Knew

The Life and Times of Alan Greenspan

By: Sebastian Mallaby

Narrated by: Dan Woren

“Exceptional . . . Deeply researched and elegantly written . . . As a description of the politics and pressures under which modern independent central banking has to operate, the book is incomparable.” —Financial Times

The definitive biography of the most important economic statesman of our time, from the bestselling author of The Power Law and More Money Than God

Sebastian Mallaby's magisterial biography of Alan Greenspan, the product of over five years of research based on untrammeled access to his subject and his closest professional and personal intimates, brings into vivid focus the mysterious point where the government and the economy meet. To understand Greenspan's story is to see the economic and political landscape of our time—and the presidency from Reagan to George W. Bush—in a whole new light. As the most influential economic statesman of his age, Greenspan spent a lifetime grappling with a momentous shift: the transformation of finance from the fixed and regulated system of the post-war era to the free-for-all of the past quarter century. The story of Greenspan is also the story of the making of modern finance, for good and for ill.

Greenspan's life is a quintessential American success story: raised by a single mother in the Jewish émigré community of Washington Heights, he was a math prodigy who found a niche as a stats-crunching consultant. A master at explaining the economic weather to captains of industry, he translated that skill into advising Richard Nixon in his 1968 campaign. This led to a perch on the White House Council of Economic Advisers, and then to a dazzling array of business and government roles, from which the path to the Fed was relatively clear. A fire-breathing libertarian and disciple of Ayn Rand in his youth who once called the Fed's creation a historic mistake, Mallaby shows how Greenspan reinvented himself as a pragmatist once in power. In his analysis, and in his core mission of keeping inflation in check, he was a maestro indeed, and hailed as such. At his retirement in 2006, he was lauded as the age's necessary man, the veritable God in the machine, the global economy's avatar. His memoirs sold for record sums to publishers around the world.

But then came 2008. Mallaby's story lands with both feet on the great crash which did so much to damage Alan Greenspan's reputation. Mallaby argues that the conventional wisdom is off base: Greenspan wasn't a naïve ideologue who believed greater regulation was unnecessary. He had pressed for greater regulation of some key areas of finance over the years, and had gotten nowhere. To argue that he didn't know the risks in irrational markets is to miss the point. He knew more than almost anyone; the question is why he didn't act, and whether anyone else could or would have. A close reading of Greenspan's life provides fascinating answers to these questions, answers whose lessons we would do well to heed. Because perhaps Mallaby's greatest lesson is that economic statesmanship, like political statesmanship, is the art of the possible. The Man Who Knew is a searching reckoning with what exactly comprised the art, and the possible, in the career of Alan Greenspan.

Greenspan Throughout

The insistence on using Greenspan as the reference name for the subject throughout the book dropped me out of the text pretty reliably. I'm not sure why. I wouldn't have recognized who the author was talking about if he had referred to him as Alan. Listened to back to back with The Big Short, you can get a feel for both sides of the 2008 crash.

Who knew?

Who knew you could make a book about Greenspan riveting? Great book with a greater performance. The more you hear, the more you want to hear.
Not just a biography of Greenspan, but a review of the machinations of the American economy post-Eisenhower.

A excellent / wonderful biography

A very interesting book. Highly recommended. Easy to listen to.
Provides a good understanding of Dr. Greenspan - the man and his ideas.

The real Alan

Having lived thru this era, I could never understand how he went from hero to bum so fast. The real story that he was neither. It was the public that raised him up and brought him down -- all with 20:20 hindsight.

A superb biography

Much better on Greenspan than anything Greenspan himself wrote. You get a good picture of the great economist and forecaster, the shrewd political operative, and the mistakes he did make, without excuses. Mallaby is an excellent writer -- read also "More Money Than God".