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Fed Chair Alan Greenspan intentionally babbled meaningless slop and got away with it

Ellsworth Toohey
Jun 18, 2026
∙ Paid

Alan Greenspan official portrait (Wikimedia Commons) | Public domain

While chairman of the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan developed what economist Alan Blinder called “a turgid dialect of English” — deliberate obscurantism designed to prevent financial markets from overreacting to his words. He admitted as much in a 2007 interview with 60 Minutes’s Lesl…

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