The Man Who Knew: The Life and Times of Alan Greenspan.

AuthorSmith, Daniel J.
PositionBook review

The Man Who Knew: The Life and Times of Alan Greenspan

By Sebastian Mallaby

New York: Penguin Press, 2016.

Pp. XV, 781. $40 hardcover.

Aside from the Great Depression, Alan Greenspan's tenure at the Federal Reserve may be the most studied period of U.S. central banking as measured by the number of academic and popular books written about the period. Sebastian Mallaby's new book, The Man Who Knew: The Life and Times of Alan Greenspan, joins a number of Greenspan biographies that include Steven Beckner's Back from the Brink (New York: Wiley, 1996), Justin Martin's Greenspan (Cambridge, Mass.: Perseus, 2000), Bob Woodward's Maestro (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000), Jerome Tuccille's Alan Shrugged (Hoboken, N.J.: Wiley, 2002), and Frederick Sheehan's Panderer to Power (New York: McGrawHill, 2010), as well as, of course, Greenspan's autobiography, The Age of Turbulence (New York: Penguin, 2007).

The Man Who Knew stands out from these previous works by offering the most comprehensive and detailed biography of Greenspan to date. Mallaby delivers an exhaustive and intimate biography of Greenspan that traces the path from his youth through his consulting and political career and all the way through his tenure as chairman of the Fed. The book necessarily retreads many of the well-known Greenspan stories covered in past Greenspan biographies--for instance, the account of when Greenspan, after getting off a plane in Dallas on Black Monday (October 19, 1987), misinterpreted the market dropping "five oh eight" as 5.08 points rather than 508 points (p. 347). The book, however, adds far more detail to many of these well-worn stories and offers many new entertaining accounts. For example, Mallaby relates how Greenspan, in an attempt to raise congressional support in 1995 for a federal bailout of Mexico, was pressured by Newt Gingrich to set up a telephone call with Rush Limbaugh (pp. 470-78). More commonly known, after failing to receive congressional support, Greenspan took matters into his own hands by running the bailout through the Exchange Stabilization Fund (pp. 470-78).

The book, however, covers Greenspan's personal life in such extensive detail that it may frustrate readers concerned primarily with the monetary or political aspects of Greenspan's career. Mallaby's talent for writing, however, makes the personal stories, including those involving Greenspan's romantic flings with the likes of Barbara Walters, his complicated professional...

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