Alan Greenspan - The Age of Turbulence: 7/10

"Creative Destruction". That's the oxymoronic buzzword at the centre of Alan Greenspan's autobiography-cum-assessment of the global economy past and present. Students of financial history will find it essential reading. For the rest of us mere mortals, it's worth knowing that The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World is a book of two halves.

Part I is Greenspan at his best. He charts his rise from sharing a cramped apartment with his working-class mother in Manhattan's Washington Heights to the most powerful central banker in the world.

Alan Greenspan was chairman of the US's Federal Reserve for 18 years. His gnomic utterances were surgically-dissected by journalists and traders scouring for any hints as to where interest rates might be heading. He coined the term "irrational exhuberance" when the dot-com bubble inflated. And slashed interest rates when it burst, to protect the US economy.

He had the ears of Presidents Ford, Reagen, Bush (Senior), Clinton and Bush Jr. What he said mattered. And it makes for fascinating reading. In part I.

Part II, where he muses on everything from China, to Russia to how America will pay social security for its ageing population, is the opposite. Gossip-laden anecdotes of meetings with Mikael Gorbachev aside, his thoughts on the new world economic order belies his ignorance. His musings on Medicare will be of interest to nobody outside of the Unites States.

And the one question he fails to answer - even in the Epilogue added to the paperback edition - is the role or blame he ought to assume for the current financial mess the world finds itself in.

Many analysts and commentators blame Greenspan for keeping interest rates far too low for far too long. And that the cheap money this created caused an asset-price bubble, and a borrowing binge that the world will take years to recover from.

To be fair to Greenspan, on October 23 of this year, he did admit to Congress that he'd made a mistake in thinking that the markets would be able to regulate themselves and that governemnts could leave banks and hedge funds to their own devices.

But he's yet to accept the blame for the flood of cheap money that caused a bubble to form - perhaps because he still believes that you only know when a bubble's a bubble in hindsight.

Even so, this is a meaty book, rich with anecdote and name-dropping. And although the second half disappointed (I wish I'd skipped straight to the Epilogue), part I alone is worth the cover price.