In the immediate aftermath of September 11, 2001, in his fourteenth year as chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, Alan Greenspan took part in a very quiet collective effort to ensure that America didn't experience an economic meltdown, taking the rest of the world with it. There was good reason to fear the worst: the stock market crash of October 1987, his first major crisis as Federal Reserve chairman, occurring just weeks after he assumed control, had come much closer than is even today generally known to freezing the financial system and triggering a genuine financial panic. Yet the most remarkable thing that happened to the economy after 9/11 was... nothing. What in an earlier day would have meant a crippling shock to the system was absorbed astonishingly quickly. We are truly living in a new world, he reflected, not for the first time nor for the last. The Age of Turbulence is Alan Greenspan's reckoning with the nature of this new world, channeled through his own experience of working in the command room of the global economy for longer than any other single figure. Alan Greenspan shares the story of his life first simply with an eye toward doing justice to the amount of history that he has experienced and shaped. But his other goal is to draw readers along the same learning curve he followed, so that they gain a grasp of his own understanding of the underlying dynamics that drive world events. In the second half of the book, Dr. Greenspan embarks on a tour d'horizon of the global economy. He reveals the universals of economic growth, delves into the specific facts on the ground in each of the major countries and regions of the world, and explains where the trend lines of globalization point from here.