In the immediate aftermath of September 11, 2001, in his fourteenth year as chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, Alan Greenspan took part in a very quiet collective effort to ensure that America didn’t experience an economic meltdown, taking the rest of the world with it. Yet the most remarkable thing that happened to the economy after 9/11 was . . . nothing. We are truly living in a new world, he reflected, not for the first time nor for the last.
THE AGE OF TURBULENCE is Alan Greenspan’s incomparable reckoning with the nature of this new world. He begins his account on that morning of September 11, but then leaps back to his childhood and follows the arc of his remarkable life’s journey through his more than eighteen-year tenure as chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, from 1987 to 2006, during a time of transforming change. He reveals the universals of economic growth, delves into the specific facts on the ground in each of the major countries and regions of the world, and explains where the trend lines of globalization point from here. The distillation of a life’s worth of wisdom and insight into an elegant expression of a coherent worldview, THE AGE OF TURBULENCE will stand as Alan Greenspan’s personal and intellectual legacy.