Greenspan: Dark chocolate, gold bars and the maestro who shaped a century of capitalism

Alan Greenspan, who died on June 22 aged 100, was the most consequential central banker of the modern era — and one of the most contradictory. A Ayn Rand libertarian who thrived at the heart of big government for nearly two decades as Federal Reserve chairman, he was also a gold obsessive who spent evenings staring at a lump of the metal and periodically called for a return to the gold standard. Bloomberg Opinion's Adrian Wooldridge, who co-authored Capitalism in America with Greenspan, offers a rare, intimate portrait. South Africans have their own reason to remember him: it was the Fed's inflation-targeting framework that Labour Minister turned SARB Governor Tito Mboweni studied and adapted when he modernised SA’s Reserve Bank after 1999..By Adrian Wooldridge.“Do you ever indulge?” Alan Greenspan, then in his early nineties, asked with a twinkle in the eye. We were both flagging — it was four in the afternoon, and we had been labouring since nine — and I replied, flustered, that I might have done a bit as an undergraduate, but those days were over. The former Federal Reserve chairman immediately got up from the large table where we sat, walked over to his desk with a surprisingly jaunty step given his back problems, and produced a slim package wrapped in silver foil. We then sat in silence munching on his secret stash of dark chocolate.I had never met Greenspan when our mutual editor at Penguin decided it might be an idea to put us together to write an economic history of the US, eventually published as Capitalism in America: A History. The ex-Fed boss concluded that I passed his ideological test largely because, when he first called me, I was attending the Edinburgh Book Festival and he associated the city with Adam Smith and the Scottish Enlightenment.We spent many weeks working together every day in his office on Washington’s Connecticut Avenue. He liked to talk extempore while I took notes, though he frequently interrupted his flow with calls for his assistants to produce charts. There followed months of me submitting drafts and him returning them scrawled all over in handwriting almost as illegible as my own.I naturally started off in awe — Greenspan had been at the heart of the global economy for decades and had an exotic background as a jazz saxophonist and Ayn Rand disciple while I was a mere scribbler — but he treated me as an equal. He called me at odd times, often prompted by the discovery of a historical curiosity. Always charming and often funny, he was free from the self-importance that is almost obligatory for Washington’s great and good.Greenspan came across as a 1950s organization man. He always wore a suit and tie, and his office was spick and span. When I suggested that the Silicon Valley of the 1980s owed something to the spirit of the counterculture, he refused to countenance it. For him, the computer revolution was the handiwork of men in white shirts and pocket protectors. Yet there were plenty of contradictions beneath the surface.He was an ideologue with an acute political sense; a libertarian who had thrived at the heart of big government — and who had once outmaneuvered Henry Kissinger. In his nineties, he frequently reverted to his youthful passions. He sometimes talked about the desirability of returning to the gold standard and painted both FDR and the New Deal in the blackest colors. I tried to moderate these enthusiasms not by direct argument but by appealing to his political sense. Such arguments might arouse unnecessary hostility, I argued, and therefore reduce our chances of getting our bigger message across.He was also a hard head with a soft heart. The five-volume Cambridge Historical Statistics of the United States occupied pride of place on his shelves, almost like a religious icon. His appetite for work was boundless, almost as if he thought it would suspend the aging process. Yet he doted on his wife, NBC’s Andrea Mitchell, either watching her TV appearances live or recording them. and he had an eclectic collection of heroes such as James Hill, the railway tycoon, Grover Cleveland, the US president who defended laissez-faire orthodoxy, and Alexander Hamilton. He confessed he was so fascinated by gold that he often spent the evening staring at a lump of it.He was not so sentimental about his lifetime in politics. There were no misty-eyed reminiscences. An obvious reason was that the Democrats, under Bill Clinton, had done a better job of delivering his ideal of a balanced budget than his own party, the Republicans. He frequently mentioned that Clinton was the most intelligent president he had worked for, along with Nixon. He seemed detached from the contemporary conservative movement. He frequently mentioned that Donald Trump cheated at golf, a grave sin for this golf- and tennis-loving man. He was furious that a right-wing talk show host who moved into his neighborhood was building a giant deck. Brexit for him was pure folly.This points to another Greenspan contradiction: He was a conservative ideologue who loved the Washington establishment. He cited liberals such as the historian Alan Brinkley and the Supreme Court judge Stephen Breyer as sources of historical wisdom. This all melded into Anglophilia. His favorite TV show was Downton Abbey. His favorite UK politician, as far as I could tell, was Gordon Brown, who invited him to give a speech at Adam Smith’s birthplace. He was inordinately proud that he shared a birthday with the queen.Yet there can be no doubt about the radicalism of his view of economic history. Greenspan shared Joseph Schumpeter’s belief that the most powerful force in human affairs was creative destruction. The only way for society to get richer is to increase productivity. And the only way to lift productivity is the ruthless replacement of inefficiency with efficiency. This will always be fraught because interest groups will favor the past over the future and political fantasists will pretend you can have high living standards without incessant renewal.Greenspan regarded the US as the greatest theater of creative destruction because it combined economic freedom, enshrined in the constitution, with vast natural resources. He celebrated the ability of business geniuses to imagine the future and then summon up giant enterprises to bring it into being. For him, Carnegie and Rockefeller were giants of creativity rather than robber barons.His favorite era of US history was the gilded age when business towered over government. For all his years at Washington’s heart, he believed the job of politicians was to provide a stable environment so that entrepreneurs could make bets on the future. He was enthralled by globalization because he thought that it could repeat the process that made America the world’s richest country.I could never quite gauge how responsible he felt for the financial crisis. In 2008, he admitted to Congress that he had relied on overoptimistic economic models, but when we were working together he put a lot of the blame for the housing bust on bipartisan US policies that encouraged people who couldn’t afford mortgages to buy homes. He regarded financial bubbles as an inevitable part of capitalism, which may be one reason why he kept hankering after the gold standard as the best way to control them.He also worried more than his critics might have allowed that the financial sector had got both too big and too self-serving. Though he spent much of his pre-Fed career pronouncing on Wall Street’s mysterious ways, and though he became a “new economy” booster, his greatest love was for the real economy: for the people who made real things in real places such as Cleveland and Detroit and managed to solve real logistical problems with refrigerated rail carts and shipping containers..Read more:.Fed cuts rates as Powell warns US labour market weakness emerging.Penguin eventually turned our efforts into a beautiful book. The cover showed a 1904 view of lower Manhattan enveloped in smoke; there were 32 pages of plates and dozens of charts. As we sat contemplating the fruits of our labor, I quipped that the only thing that could prevent the book from becoming a bestseller was that the title, Capitalism in America, combined the two most unpopular words in the English language. He looked at me in complete confusion — for him these words were about as romantic as you could get. .© 2026 Bloomberg L.P..Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox every morning on weekdays. Register here.Support South Africa's bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here.

Greenspan: Dark chocolate, gold bars and the maestro who shaped a century of capitalism

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