James Harland

Penguin’s irrational exuberance

James Harland on Alan Greenspan's memoirs

issue 06 October 2007

What’s the biggest threat to the stability of the global economy today? Derivatives? Hedge funds? The credit crunch? Actually it could be Pearson, the company that owns the Financial Times. How so? By allowing its Penguin imprint to pay $8.5 million for the memoirs of Alan Greenspan, the former chairman of the US Federal Reserve.

Let me explain. In March last year, Penguin won an auction for worldwide rights to Greenspan’s memoirs — titled The Age of Turbulence — beating off competition from the rest of the publishing industry. The cheque it ultimately wrote was the second-largest ever paid for a non-fiction book, only beaten by Bill Clinton’s My Life at $10 million.

Now, Greenspan is an estimable figure. He ran the Fed from 1987 until 2006, presiding over an extraordinary expansion of the US and global economies.

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