Michael Kinsley: M1 and Me

An exclusive excerpt from Alan Greenspan's $8.5 million memoir.

Posted Friday, March 10, 2006, at 6:09 AM ET

(Editor's note: Penguin Press is reportedly paying $8.5 million for the memoirs of former Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan. During 18 years at the Fed, until his retirement in January, Greenspan captivated Washington and the world with his pronouncements about the economy, delivered in a style that came to be known as "oracular obscurity." According to the Yale literary critic Harold Bloom—no mean practitioner himself, according to some observers—"Oracular obscurity combines the spoken traditions of Homer and Shakespeare with the writing style of postwar French pomposité grandiloquente and just a dash of Latin American magic realism to produce and entirely new phenomenon that has reinvented congressional testimony as a literary genre." But experts say it is not clear how well the oracular-obscurist style will adapt itself to the genre of autobiography. The book is due to be published in September of next year. According to publishing industry sources, Greenspan's working title is Considerations. The publisher's working title is, Is Your Money Supply Expanding, or Are You Just Happy To See Me? This column has obtained an early sample of the contents.)