During his eighteen-year tenure as chairman of the USA’s central bank, the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan was arguably the world’s most powerful public servant, and probably the most revered. This soft-spoken New Yorker – blue-suited and bespectacled like an older Clark Kent – came to be credited with an almost superhuman ability to calm or stimulate markets and hold the US economy on course for prosperity. His public statements, dense with obscure statistics and often deliberately ambiguous, were habitually hailed as pearls of sublime wisdom.

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