She writes:

...Greenspan's godlike stature was always somewhat alarming to me, even back in the go-go years, but he reached such untouchable status that it had become a form of heresy to gainsay him. From these transcripts, it's fairly clear that these people were all courtiers in Greenspan's Palace. It's pathetic.

The fact is that there were some people outside the inner circle jerk who saw things differently. Brad DeLong pointed it out yesterday...

Digby then links to this DeLong post wherein he first pastes in a quote from the September '06 meeting of Dallas Fed President Richard Fisher which reveals both that committee member's faulty analysis and now ironic jocularity. DeLong follows that with more paste work from a June '06 NY Times column showing that Paul Krugman had argued correctly that fears of inflation, which were of such concern to Fisher and his colleagues in their closed door meetings, were unfounded.

What Digby might not know is that in 2007 here, in two parts, is what one reviewer was writing about The Maestro when his memoir appeared:

...Greenspan is world famous because he was very good and very lucky at this role. During his tenure at the Federal Reserve, he made roughly 36 substantive decisions about the direction interest rates should go. Six times I disagreed with him. Five of those six times, I was wrong. (The sixth? In the summer and fall of 2000, as the dot-com stock-market bubble crashed, I would have been cutting interest rates had I been sitting in Greenspan's chair; he waited for more information to see how much the fall in stock-market values would affect high-tech investment spending before he acted.)

That is an amazing record -- much better than Barry Bonds', and Greenspan clearly has never been on steroids. It is certainly much better than most economists I know could have done. Now this veritable rock-star economist-technocrat has written "The Age of Turbulence" with Peter Petre (who wrote the autobiographies of Gen. H. Norman Schwartzkopf and IBM head Thomas J. Watson Jr.). The voice in the book is Petre's. In a sense, this is too bad: Greenspan's voice is unique and a good window into his mind. But it is also nearly incomprehensible, even to trained professionals. And Petre has done a superb job of translating Greenspanese into English.

"The Age of Turbulence" is three books in one.

The first tells us who Greenspan is. It is the one that will speak to non-economist non-financier readers. The stories are wonderful: of a professional-caliber jazz clarinetist in New York in the 1950s, playing his sets and then reading his economics books during the breaks while fellow musicians go backstage to party and get high. Of a 26-year-old "math junkie" being knocked back on his heels by his philosophical guru, Ayn Rand, objectivist author of "The Fountainhead" and "Atlas Shrugged," when she pulls Descartes' "I think, therefore I exist" move on him. Of an economic advisor trying to educate, serve and guide Presidents Nixon, Ford, Reagan, Bush I, Clinton and Bush II. (Nixon wasn't just anti-Semitic, Greenspan tells us, but anti-everyone...) Of inviting NBC News correspondent Andrea Mitchell, now Mrs. Greenspan, back to his apartment to read his essay on monopolies....

Again, that appeared in 2007, a year after the Tim Geithner quote when certain progressives, apparently, were still in courtier mode. Maybe that's the slurping sound you're hearing across the years.