THE MAN WHO KNEW The Life and Times of Alan Greenspan By Sebastian Mallaby

THE MAN WHO KNEW
The Life and Times of Alan Greenspan
By Sebastian Mallaby
Illustrated. 781 pp. Penguin Press. $40.

In 1959, at the annual meeting of the American Statistical Association, a 33-year-old economist named Alan Greenspan argued that central banks should beware of letting financial markets get too comfortable. The Federal Reserve’s success in smoothing economic fluctuations in the 1920s, he said, had led to the dangerous belief that “the business cycle is dead.” The crash and depression that followed were “inevitable” consequences of that cavalier attitude toward risk.
You may be familiar with two landmarks of Greenspan’s early years: He was a professional jazz musician and a disciple of the extreme-libertarian novelist/philosopher Ayn Rand. Greenspan’s stint as a clarinet and saxophone player in a second-tier swing band started when he was 18; his Rand infatuation began in his late 20s.
It was Greenspan’s libertarianism that propelled him into politics, but his other attributes that made him successful at it. At Rand’s urging, he delivered a series of lectures in 1963 and 1964 on the “Economics of a Free Society,” inveighing against, among other things, “one of the historic disasters in American history, the creation of the Federal Reserve System.” 

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/06/books/review/alan-greenspan-man-who-knew-sebastian-mallaby.html?ref=economy