In his book Greenspan’s Bubbles, Fred Sheehan examines the work done by Alan Greenspan during his tenure as chairman of the Federal Reserve. Today, he shows us how the personality of Greenspan effected the way he ran the economy and how he marketed himself to the media. Was Greenspan a brilliant economic mind, or merely a brilliant self-promoter?

I recently heard a radio interview with a prominent economist who was defending Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke’s moves to shore up the markets on Wall Street. Bernanke, the economist said with emphasis, had spent years studying the “mistakes” of the Fed during the Great Depression and was not going to repeat the “errors” that the Fed directors committed from 1930 to 1933.