Alan Greenspan — the titan of central banking who died this week aged 100 — had an extremely specific way with words.
“Since I’ve become a central banker, I’ve learned to mumble with great incoherence,” goes one much-repeated quote, from early in his near 20-year stint as chair of the US Federal Reserve. This captured a legendary communication style that came to be known as “Fedspeak”.
Incoherent mumbling or, as Greenspan put it on another occasion, engaging in a “form of syntax destruction” to avoid answering questions, continued a tradition of purposeful obfuscation by central bankers. As he said: “That’s something which I learned from Paul [Volcker, his predecessor], who did that in a manner which was approaching a work of art.”
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