美国联邦准备理事会前主席葛林斯潘，对世界金融市场的影响力仍举足轻重。九一一事件的冲击也让他看清，我们已然处于更弹性、变动更快速的动荡新世界。本书分为两部分，前半回顾一生，从孩提到联准会十八年的任期；后半则是淬炼其智识与洞见，以之解释全球化的趋势。 由本书高达八百五十万美金的版税即可推知它的重要性。 葛林斯潘（Alan Greenspan）从1987年开始担任美国联邦准备理事会主席，甫于2006年1月退休。他在世界金融圈呼风唤雨，影响力无人能及，是全球最有权势的人士之一。国际媒体对他推崇备至，人人视他为英雄与远见者、也是史上最棒的经济学家之一，但也有人批评他每每发言影响金融市场、干扰经济。 1987年，他担任联准会主席不久之后发生了股灾，造成全球经济风暴及恐慌；在这样的前车之鉴下，911事件发生之后，他立即着手准备相关的应变措施，避免严重的经济衰退、意图将911事件的经济冲击降到最低；但没想到在911事件之后，什么事也没有发生！在 911事件之后， Greenspan认知到了全球资本经济环境已经和二十年前大不相同，更加开放、弹性、自主，而变化快速，带给人们前所未有的诸多机会。在本书中，Greenspan以他自身的经验，带领读者检视了这个新经济世界的本质。他从911事件发生的早晨开始谈起，并回顾了他的童年时期对他后来人生的影响。在书中他也谈到了在他十八年的美国联准会主席任期中所经历的转变。 本书是 Greenspan 的自传性质作品。在本书的前半段，Greenspan分享了他的经验，在这一个绝无仅有的经济环境中，他经历了、又创造了什么，Geenspan 为读者描绘出他所经历的学习曲线、分享他当前经济的了解，让读者可以更快抓住这个驱使世界不断变化的动态环境。而在本书的后半，Geenspan则是为读者介绍了了解全球经济最重要的概念工具：他举出经济成长的共通点、探究各个主要地区及国家所发生的特殊事件、并解释了今后全球化的趋势导向。 作者将其一生的智慧学识和观察浓缩在这本书之中，传达他一以贯之的世界价值观，本书将成为 Geenspan 送给人类社会最珍贵的智慧遗产。

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, coming 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. But 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. After 9/11 Alan Greenspan knew, if he needed any further reinforcement, that we're living in a new world - the world of a global capitalist economy that is vastly more flexible, resilient, open, self-directing, and fast-changing than it was even 20 years ago. It's a world that presents us with enormous new possibilities but also enormous new challenges. The Age of Turbulence is Alan Greenspan's incomparable reckoning with the nature of this new world - how we got here, what we're living through, and what lies over the horizon, for good and for ill-channeled through his own experiences working in the command room of the global economy for longer and with greater effect than any other single living figure. He begins his account on that September 11th morning, but then leaps back to his childhood, and follows the arc of his remarkable life's journey through to his more than 18-year tenure as Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, from 1987 to 2006, during a time of transforming change. Alan Greenspan shares the story of his life first simply with an eye toward doing justice to the extraordinary amount of history he has experienced and shaped. But his other goal is to draw readers along the same learning curve he followed, so they accrue a grasp of his own understanding of the underlying dynamics that drive world events. In the second half of the book, having brought us to the present and armed us with the conceptual tools to follow him forward, Dr. Greenspan embarks on a magnificent tour de 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 what the trend-lines of globalization are from here. The distillation of a life's worth of wisdom and insight into an elegant expression of a coherent worldview, The Age of Turbulence will stand as Alan Greenspan's personal and intellectual legacy.