Greenspanish Primer

(Via Eddy Elfenbein) Elizabeth Spiers looks at the Maestro:

Americans have a long history of confusing inscrutability with genius. The less you say, the conventional wisdom goes, the smarter people will think you are. Alan Greenspan, the most powerful Fed chairman in history, built his storied career on this simple, if shaky, premise. His memoir, The Age of Turbulence, will be published this month, and it will be interesting to see how he stretches this rhetorical formula across 640 pages. Greenspan's particular style has always been to offer a short restating of the facts that are obvious to most economic observers, peppered with a few original insights that can be interpreted as black, white, or a blackish-whitish shade of gray, depending on who's listening. In Greenspanish, two and two may equal four. But it may also equal two discrete sets of two that shall never become four. And that assumes we all agree on how four should be defined. (If you find that analogy impenetrable, just make like a Greenspan acolyte and assume that it's brilliant.)