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Adventures in a New World
Penguin
September 2007
On Sale: September 17, 2007
544 pages ISBN: 1594201315 EAN: 9781594201318 Hardcover
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Non-Fiction Memoir
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. There was
good reason to fear the worst: the stock market crash of
October 1987, his first major crisis as Federal Reserve
Chairman, coming just weeks after he assumed control, had
come much closer than is even today generally known to
freezing the financial system and triggering a genuine
financial panic. But the most remarkable thing that happened
to the economy after 9/11 was...nothing. What in an earlier
day would have meant a crippling shock to the system was
absorbed astonishingly quickly. After 9/11 Alan Greenspan knew, if he needed any further
reinforcement, that we're living in a new world - the world
of a global capitalist economy that is vastly more flexible,
resilient, open, self-directing, and fast-changing than it
was even 20 years ago. It's a world that presents us with
enormous new possibilities but also enormous new challenges.
The Age of Turbulence is Alan Greenspan's incomparable
reckoning with the nature of this new world - how we got
here, what we're living through, and what lies over the
horizon, for good and for ill-channeled through his own
experiences working in the command room of the global
economy for longer and with greater effect than any other
single living figure. He begins his account on that
September 11th morning, but then leaps back to his
childhood, and follows the arc of his remarkable life's
journey through to his more than 18-year tenure as Chairman
of the Federal Reserve Board, from 1987 to 2006, during a
time of transforming change. Alan Greenspan shares the story of his life first simply
with an eye toward doing justice to the extraordinary amount
of history he has experienced and shaped. But his other goal
is to draw readers along the same learning curve he
followed, so they accrue a grasp of his own understanding of
the underlying dynamics that drive world events. In the
second half of the book, having brought us to the present
and armed us with the conceptual tools to follow him
forward, Dr. Greenspan embarks on a magnificent tour de
horizon of the global economy. 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 what the trend-lines of globalization
are 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.
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