Greenspan promises surprises in book

Former US Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan has promised to deliver surprises and insights about the future in an eagerly…

Former US Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan has promised to deliver surprises and insights about the future in an eagerly awaited book, but he gave little away for now beyond saying interest rates were low.

Mr Greenspan, who can still move markets with the slightest word, said he would bring to bear the lessons learned steering the world's biggest economy to discuss his views on the future in the book to be published in September.

He said the prevalence of low interest rates throughout the world was one of the things that surprised him as he came to the conclusion of his book, The Age of Turbulence.

The former Fed chief admitted he wrote much of the book in the bath tub in long-hand notes that were dutifully transcribed from damp sheets of paper by an assistant.

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The book, to be published by Penguin on September 17th, will examine his eighteen and a half years at the helm of the US central bank.

"I'm not holding back in the book," he said at a publishing convention in New York. "There are a lot of surprises in the book."

Mr Greenspan said he set out to write a memoir, from childhood to his time as adviser to Presidents Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan and then as the world's most influential economist, but ended up writing an analytical book about both the past and the future.

"When I got to look at the future there were very unusual things going on now," he said.