Alan Greenspan

Competition, free enterprise and globalisation are regularly criticised today for a range of sins. A counterbalance to such criticism, Alan Greenspan’s view is that continuing the current free-market approach to managing economies is the only way to ensure prosperity in ‘The Age of Turbulence’ in which we live.

Greenspan, now in his eighty-second year, has been a significant participant in, and student of, the global economy for the past sixty years. Based on that experience and the positions he has held, with arguably unique access to information and the best economic minds, his clear view is that the continuous rise in prosperity and living standards in the United States and globally is a direct result of competition, free enterprise and flexible economies, with minimum government interference.

Peter Hartcher has written a terrific book. It is that rarity in Australian publishing: an account of a significant economic event written in language that is totally comprehensible to the non-economist. It is shaped like a true-crime psychological thriller.

The scene of the carnage is the American dotcom bubble, which began to gather pace in 1996 and in time became ‘the mightiest mania in the four centuries of financial capitalism’. When it finally imploded in March 2000, it had wiped out US$7.8 trillion in shareholder wealth, and in the ensuing recession 2.3 million people were thrown out of work. Hartcher accuses the soon-to-retire chairman of the US Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan, of being one of the principal culprits in this debacle, and his book seeks to justify that verdict and to explore how it came about.