Because He Couldn't Hear Him NEWS ITEM: Greenspan in 1987 said he had "learned to mumble with great incoherence." (USA Today) I want to take this opportunity, on the occasion of a cycle of media coverage of the publication of a book by a certain former chairman of the Federal Reserve Board to express myself in no uncertain and certainly no less prolix terms than said chairman to say that certain sayings ascribed to the subject of this discursis were subject to such scrutiny as practically, if not irrationally, and often exhuberantly, to confer upon them the status of scripture. Cultivating a cult of confusion to cover critical questions, especially where one is endowed with authority but without accountability, is indeed a time-honored strategy for suggesting that one is a suitable steward of the sanctified secrets of the priesthood, mindful that mobs, markets, and mere mortals must not meddle in such matters of great moment as monetary policy. Therefore, we mumble.