Free Absolute Risk by Steven Gore Page A

increase the gross national product of gadgets.”
    Kahn reddened, glanced around, and then slipped his BlackBerry into his shirt pocket.
    Abrams felt a certain warmth envelop his body when he said that line and thought back to when he composed it while playing his self-appointed role as an adjunct professor of the New York transit system.
    In the weeks after his confirmation by the Senate, Abrams had discovered that a temporary advantage of being a new Federal Reserve chairman was that those who vilify the position still lacked a recognizable face to target. That way it was still possible for him to do his research, not in his Liberty Street office at the New York branch of the Fed, but where it should be done, on the subway. He’d come to view trains not as mere modes of transportation, but as moving classrooms, each stop a mid-term, and the terminus at Pelham Bay or Far Rockaway or Jamaica Center, the final exam.
    It was at the Fifty-ninth Street-Columbus Circle Station a week earlier, observing the kids gathered on the platform after their Friday demonstration, clutching their iPods, slipping in their earbuds, texting “c-u-L8-r” on their iPhones, that he’d composed the phrase “gross national product of gadgets,” along with another one:
    “We look at the world through a microscope of economic analysis or a telescope of political synthesis, when we should be looking in the mirror.”
    Beautiful. Absolutely beautiful.
Abrams wasn’t sure that he fully understood the implications of the line yet, but Fed chairmen were allowed to be incomprehensible, even to themselves. After all, it was one of his predecessors who’d said, “I know you believe you understand what you think I said; but what you fail to realize is that what you heard is not what I meant,” and who later admitted that he didn’t know what he’d meant either.
    Abrams glanced at his watch and sniffed at the faint remnants of the tear gas still floating in the air. There would be no time for questions today, and no answers—at least from him—that would move the markets tomorrow.

CHAPTER 13
    T he gross national product of gadgets?” former U.S. president Randall Harris said, as he flicked off the television in his New York office. “The telescope of political synthesis? He makes me miss that nincompoop Greenspan.”
    Harris looked over at Ronald Minsky, CEO of Relative Growth Funds and former professor of finance at Harvard. “Hasn’t he noticed that Relative Growth has solved all of the problems he keeps complaining about?”
    Minsky smiled. “Hegel wrote that the owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk.”
    “What the devil does that mean?” Harris finished the question in his mind,
you fucking Jew-boy intellectual.
Abrams. Minsky. Greenspan. They were all the same. But then he remembered that Minsky was a Polish Catholic.
The punk must be a convert.
    “It just means that we only recognize eras once they’ve passed.”
    Harris pushed himself up off the couch and walked to his desk. He picked up the Morningstar analyst’s report on Relative Growth Funds and waved it at Minsky.
    “Hasn’t Abrams ever wondered why we’ve never missed a dividend,” Harris said, “never did worse than break even, even during the crashes?”
    “He thinks it’s just chance or good luck,” Minsky said, and then grinned. “And it’s not as if we’re transparent.”
    Harris frowned. He didn’t like hearing the word. It made him uncomfortable enough just to be on the board of an offshore hedge fund, much less be reminded of the secrecy with which it operated. If it hadn’t been for the other two ex-U.S. presidents who’d taken seats on the board before him, he wasn’t sure whether he would’ve done it. And they wouldn’t have joined unless George H. W. Bush hadn’t already blazed the trail to the Carlyle Group.
    Minsky. Everyone had been talking about this genius Minsky. How he’d made his first billions