Alan Greenspan's Little Shop of Horrors

Before Alan Greenspan took over as Chairman of the Federal Reserve, his career looked as though it was headed towards skid row. Murray Rothbard, who had known Greenspan 30 years earlier when they were both on the fringes of Ayn Rand's movement, made this assessment of things to come in August, 1987, about six weeks before Greenspan formally took office.

I found particularly remarkable the recent statements in the press that Greenspan's economic consulting firm of Townsend-Greenspan might go under, because it turns out that what the firm really sells is not its econometric forecasting models, or its famous numbers, but Greenspan himself, and his gift for saying absolutely nothing at great length and in rococo syntax with no clearcut position of any kind.
As to his eminence as a forecaster, he ruefully admitted that a pension-fund managing firm he founded a few years ago just folded for lack of ability to apply the forecasting where it counted – when investment funds were on the line.