Alan Greenspan

“After Greenspan gave his famous criticism of the CPI, I wrote a piece explaining some of the details of the key price indexes and their strengths and weaknesses. After it appeared in a New York Fed publication, I got a call from Dave Stockton, Director of Research at the Board: ‘Charlie, the Chairman didn’t like your paper.’

‘When do you want my resignation?’ I asked.

He laughed and said, ‘The Chairman agrees with all your technical points. He just doesn’t like anybody saying anything positive about the CPI.’

I was forgiven. A few years later I was given the opportunity to make a presentation at the FOMC and attended Greenspan’s retirement lunch. When I retired from the New York Fed, I received an inscribed autographed photo from Greenspan.”

“[Alan Greenspan] did care a great deal about NABE. I remember during the Policy Seminar the year I was president we went to the Fed and I introduced him to do the welcome. Since I couldn’t bring myself to give the traditional bio, I quoted his 1970 Presidential Address and posed the question whether he would change anything in his conclusion today. Instead of saying a couple of sentences of welcome, he talked for over half an hour and gave the best talk of the conference.

I never knew anyone who carefully followed more data series. When he left the Fed and became a client, I sent him a description of all of our databases with pricing. I still remember talking with him during a break at the Policy Seminar when he said, ‘I’ll take all of page 1, all of page 2...’ He ended up subscribing to nearly everything we sold.

Once he was a client, we learned he only wanted to look at seasonally adjusted figures, so we found ourselves seasonally adjusting all the state claims data, the weekly petroleum status report, and other weekly indicators he followed. He also encouraged us to create and store more specialized series, such as what came to be known as the supercore inflation rate.

He was always digging into the data and was on a first-name basis with a large number of BEA, BLS, and Census staff.”

“Alan Greenspan was a friend of mine and a terrific supporter of NABE. My first contact with him occurred when I was a new Board member in 1981 and President Kathy Eickhoff asked me to be Program Chair for the 1981 Annual Meeting. I told her I would only do that if she asked Alan to help get some big names for me.

We were all in the New York area at the time and Kathy, who was his right-hand person at Townsend Greenspan, quickly set up a meeting for me at their offices. I found him to be charming, gracious, and quite eager to help with the invitations to speakers. Most of them said yes, and we had what was then the largest attendance at any Annual Meeting.

He and I interacted many times over the subsequent years. The Board of Governors hosted a reception at a Policy Conference a few years later, and Alan approached me with a worried look on his face. ‘Jim,’ he said, ‘I have a terrible case of laryngitis and cannot welcome the group. I have to go home and rest. Would you be willing to step in for me and give my apologies to all my NABE friends?’

I agreed and then asked whether he would be a luncheon speaker that fall at the Annual Meeting in Washington, DC. He readily agreed, thanked me wholeheartedly, and went home. The group seemed satisfied with my remarks in his stead and were happy to hear he would be giving a major address at the Annual Meeting.

He was a huge hit at that Annual Meeting, the all-time attendance record holder for NABE. I have framed autographed photos from that Annual Meeting of me with him and three other speakers — David Brinkley, Mike Boskin, and President Turgut Özal of Turkey — on my office wall to this day.

We had a nice visit when he came to the Policy Conference for the group photo of almost all the living past presidents of NABE. He was a wonderful man who did many helpful things for NABE over the years. He was also extremely intelligent and always remembered relevant economic data from every NBER recession of his career.”