Maestro   (book)

Maestro: Greenspan's Fed and the American Boom

Maestro is not a biography of Greenspan so much as a history of the economy and markets during the period of his stewardship. The book's tentative working title was Boom, and the book focuses on how Greenspan engineered the great U.S. economic resurgence of the 1990s. In researching his book, Woodward interviewed not only Greenspan but nearly every important member of Washington's economic elite. The testimonies of people like Alice Rivlin, Robert Rubin, and Lawrence Summers lend weight to his analyses. And though Woodward is a journalist, not an economist, he has a strong grasp of economic theory and terminology. This proves both a strength and a weakness, as certain passages are often hard to understand, even for someone who has studied economics. However, for the most part, Woodward is very good at translating economic jargon into clear journalistic prose.

This book was very boring. I think the most important thing I took away from it is that our economic forecasting model in the US is piss-poor and most economists are practicing a type of science that Isaac Asimov called psychohistory, which isn't very comforting, considering that if you go by by Asimov's version at least, the mere fact that I can tell that is a very bad thing. USA! USA! *sigh*