But as the wild gyrations in stock prices so far this year suggest, the Fed's job is getting tougher, and that raises odds that the Great One will mess up. For investors, this is a good time to contemplate such a turn. Running the Fed is an ever more complicated chore these days. His biggest problem may be a bond market that has stopped doing the heavy lifting for him. Those are traders who set long-term interest rates in the open market.
Long rates are critical.
They govern the pace of home building and most other debt-financed activity. Greenspan controls short rates, which influence long rates but imprecisely. For most of his time at the Fed, Greenspan hasn't had to do much more than jawbone. The bond market has taken his hints and moved accordingly. A couple of years ago I ran into Greenspan's predecessor, the aggressive inflation fighter Paul Volcker, and asked him what he thought of Greenspan's performance.