GREENSPAN: The Man Behind Money.

• Author: Goozner, Merrill
• Position: Review

GREENSPAN: The MAN Behind Money by Justin Martin Perseus Book Group, $28.00

IN THIS AGE OF CELEBRITY, THE media was bound to give somebody credit for the current prosperity Why not Alan Greenspan the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board? Presidential hopeful John McCain spouted the conventional wisdom during primary season. Not only would he reappoint Greenspan, but if he died, "I would do like they did in the movie `Weekend at Bernie's.' I would prop him up and put a pair of dark glasses on him."

The "cult of Greenspan," as former Fortune magazine writer Justin Martin calls it in Greenspan: The Man Behind Money, is a worrisome development. With both political parties committed to balanced budgets and fiscal austerity the nation's central bank, arbiter of monetary affairs, dictates economic policy by default.

Yet the Fed minim among the least accountable institutions in American politics. It makes decision behind dosed doors and communicates with terse statements. Liberal congressmen rail against the Fed's inflation-fighting bias, reminding anyone who will listen--no one at the Fed does--that monetary policy is supposed to promote low unemployment as well as low inflation. Former president George Bush still blames the Fed's slow response to the 1990-91 recession for his defeat in 1992.

But during Greenspan's long reign as Fed chairman, which began a few months before the 1987 stock market crash, the shroud of secrecy surrounding Fed deliberations has slipped a bit In 1994, the powerful Open Market Committee began releasing its decisions on interest rates on the day they were made, and last year it began stating the Fed's bias about future moves. The minutes of those meetings are now issued within months and the transcripts are eventually made public.

With Republicans in charge of the key budget, banking, and taxing committees of Congress, oversight has given way to calling the chairmaninfor his studied opinions. Over the past 13 years, Greenspan has delivered an estimated 200 speeches and testimonies, a public record--admittedly much of it in jargon--that now comprises well over 3,500 pages.

This rich record will be of great interest to historians trying to evaluate the Fed's performance during the Greenspan years. He's overseen the longest economic expansion in the nation's history, accompanied by an unprecedented stock market boom. But Greenspan also presided over the savings and loan fiasco, one recession, one near-recession, and a...