My Afternoon Treats With Alan Greenspan the Gold Bug

“Do you ever indulge?” Alan Greenspan, then in his early nineties, asked with a twinkle in the eye. We were both flagging — it was four in the afternoon, and we had been laboring since nine — and I replied, flustered, that I might have done a bit as an undergraduate, but those days were over. The former Federal Reserve chairman immediately got up from the large table where we sat, walked over to his desk with a surprisingly jaunty step given his back problems, and produced a slim package wrapped in silver foil. We then sat in silence munching on his secret stash of dark chocolate.

I had never met Greenspan when our mutual editor at Penguin decided it might be an idea to put us together to write an economic history of the US, eventually published as Capitalism in America: A History. The ex-Fed boss concluded that I passed his ideological test largely because, when he first called me, I was attending the Edinburgh Book Festival and he associated the city with Adam Smith and the Scottish Enlightenment.…Read more by Adrian Wooldridge