http://online.barrons.com/article/SB120675340444773623.html?mod=b_hpp_9_0002_b_this_weeks_magazine_home_right IN ALL LIKELIHOOD, ALAN GREENSPAN has more honorary Ph.D.s than any living economist, which is no mean feat -- regardless of the chortling chorus of critics who suggest he played midwife to the first great economic crisis of the 21st century and thus is overly lionized as a financial genius. He has honorary degrees enough to fill a fair-sized wall, including parchment from Yale, Harvard, Notre Dame, Colgate, Wake Forest, Pennsylvania, Edinburgh (Scotland). The Doctor-Doctor also received an honorary knighthood in 2002 at Balmoral from Queen Elizabeth II. Sorry to say, this accolade did not come with a suit of armor.
Greenspan, who left the Fed in 2006 but is still consulted as a genius, might find a metallic exoskeleton exceptionally comforting come May, when the University of Texas Press publishes an unflattering book by Robert Auerbach entitled Deception and Abuse at the Fed: Henry B. Gonzalez Battles Alan Greenspan's Bank.
Auerbach, a veteran Fed basher, portrays Greenspan as a real-life Professor Marvel -- who, through double-talk or "garblement," transformed himself into a mighty economic wizard à la Oz. Auerbach strongly implies that Greenspan's 1977 Ph.D. from New York University was obtained in a few months with little more rigor than a matchbook-cover art degree and that Greenspan has kept his Ph.D. thesis secret in order to protect his vaunted academic reputation.
Greenspan appears to have taken only a few months to obtain his NYU doctorate in '77.
Although Auerbach's evidence is circumstantial, it certainly is provocative. For years, NYU told the public that, at Greenspan's request, the thesis was locked away from public view in a vault at its Bobst Library. Auerbach himself was told this in January 2004 when he tried to obtain a copy.
......................snip.........................
Auerbach contends in his book that Greenspan's invisible Ph.D. thesis is symbolic of a career marked by prevarication, cover-ups and a general aversion to making the Fed more publicly accountable. He calls on Congress to "bring the Fed into the Democracy" because "unelected Fed decision makers should not decide what the public should know about how they are running the central bank."