Deciphering Greenspan's relationship with the media

TheStreet.com’s Marek Fuchs reads former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan’s new book in an attempt to decipher his relationship with those in the business medit that covered him.

Fuchs conclusion: Greenspan doesn’t understand why reporters did things like emphasize in its coverage the phrase “irrational exuberance” out of a speech in the late 1990s to describe the state of the stock market.

Fuchs wrote, “Here, I don’t trust Greenspan’s falsely modest ‘What, me?’ explanation. The speech in which he mentioned ‘irrational exuberance’ was — like all his public talk — perfectly calibrated. He would never have used such explosive words, even buried so as not to immediately bury the economy, deep in the text.

“But Greenspan claims that he was a bit blindsided by the business media’s extraction of this phrase, innocently puzzled that they ran with this as their takeaway.”

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