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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 332.1120973
EAN: 9780743205627
Edition: 1st Touchstone Ed
ISBN: 0743205626
Label: Simon & Schuster
Manufacturer: Simon & Schuster
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 288
Publication Date: November 06, 2001
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Release Date: October 23, 2001
Studio: Simon & Schuster

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Editorial Review:

Amazon.com Review:
Bob Woodward called his biography of Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan Maestro for two reasons. First, Greenspan is a musician. He started out as a Julliard-trained jazz sax man. "He wasn't a good improviser," Woodward reports. And while the other guys got stoned all night, Greenspan "read economics and business books and eventually became the band's bookkeeper." He also cultivated powerful pals, like Ayn Rand, whose coterie dubbed the dour young man "The Undertaker."

More profoundly, Greenspan is a maestro, a conductor, exquisitely attuned to every instrument in the political and economic orchestra. He rules by consensus, but with a firm hand and notoriously inscrutable words. Marvelously, Woodward relates that Greenspan had to propose twice to his wife, the violinist-turned-TV news star Andrea Mitchell, before she understood: "His verbal obscurity and caution were so ingrained that Mitchell didn't even know that he had asked her to marry him." Woodward gives us the inside story of what Greenspan really thinks and how he outmaneuvered the most ruthless politicians on earth in some of the hairiest times imaginable, from the 1987 stock market crash to the 1994-95 Mexican crisis to the stomach-churning turn of the century. It turns out that for all his awesome knowledge of monetary minutiae, the Fed chief literally relies on "a pain in the pit of my stomach" to make decisions. "At times, he found his body sensed danger before his head," writes Woodward. The Fed chief also adapts Einstein's technique to economics, hunting for discrepancies as keys to deeper theories. Einstein made breakthroughs out of bent light; Greenspan deduced productivity gains that government statisticians had overlooked for years. (The gains appeared when Greenspan made the statisticians calculate productivity by business sector, the way it's done in the real world.)

Woodward's prose is cool and rational, not exuberant. But if you're into economics and politics, you'll find a rich gossip trove here. Who knew Reagan had a draft of a presidential order to shut down Wall Street trading at hand in 1987? Scary! Reading Maestro is better than sitting with Greenspan in his famous tub as he charts your future--it's like being right there inside his head. --Tim Appelo

Product Description:
Perhaps the last Washington secret is how the Federal Reserve and its enigmatic chairman, Alan Greenspan, operate. In Maestro, Bob Woodward uses his proven interviewing and research techniques to take you inside the Fed and Greenspan's thinking. Woodward presents the Greenspan years as a gripping narrative, a remarkable portrait of a man who has become the symbol of American economic preeminence.






Rating: - good for a look back at an insane time
From the prespective of 2008, this book is almost laughable. Its a fawning tribute to a man and an era that proved to be about constructing an illusion rather than building an economy.

In the overheated smokey world of the book, Alan Greenspan is "Maestro". The great humanitarian economist who can create music with an instrument or with an economy. In 2008, Alan Greenspan is a man who created two enormous asset bubbles in the world economy and led the entire world financial system to ... Read More

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Rating: - A precise time
I think that this book is very useful in the time we are living now. It show how the economy, especially the north american, but also the rest of the worl works. How the lack of responsability of what you offers to the market can destroy the market itself, and that, somehow must be supervise by some kind of goberment. anyway very interesting book.The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money

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Rating: - Intellectual Cover for a Corrupt Monetary Cartel, the Federal Reserve
~Maestro: Greenspan's Fed and the American Boom~ is a rosy bit of economic subterfuge heralding Greenspan as an economic saviour when in reality we're paying the price for the Federal Reserve's inflationary scheme throughout the 1990s. If the markets set interest rates, we wouldn't see the vicious cycles of boom and bust, the subprime mortgage crisis, and the housing bubble. But such subversion is always attendant to fractional-reserve banking. A wiser more honest Alan Greespan wrote an essay entitled ... Read More

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Rating: - Amazing book about Fed's work in layman's terms
After reading this book I realized how fascinating a book can be when it is written by a washington insider like Woodword. Amazing book describes Greenspan, Fed, Whitehouse and the economics and politics behind it in the most lucid manner possible.

Very true in nature expresses very candidly Chairman Greenspan's political manuevering and how Whitehouse makes a non political instituion political.

Excellent and much more interesting to read compared to Mr. Greenspans own auto biography ... Read More

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Rating: - "The nurturing of capital and property ownership."
The coziness of our nations politically elite always makes for interesting reading. While there are some interesting tidbits throughout, i.e. Alan Greenspans association with Ayn Rand; the familiar names of the politically entrenched and the precarious state of our nation's economic machinations, this book was a bit boring. With that said, there were two things I found fascinating about D.C. life. First, there is an extremely strong current of Ivy League uber-ambition in our nation's capital; along with an extraordinary ... Read More

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