While chairman of the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan developed what economist Alan Blinder called "a turgid dialect of English" — deliberate obscurantism designed to prevent financial markets from overreacting to his words. He admitted as much in a 2007 interview with 60 Minutes's Lesley Stahl: "I would engage in some form of syntax destruction which sounded as though I were answering the question, but in fact, had not." When Stahl pointed out that two newspapers came out of the same congressional hearing with opposing headlines, Greenspan said simply: "I succeeded."
The strategy had a practical basis. As Greenspan explained to BusinessWeek in 2012: "As Fed chairman, every time I expressed a view, I added or subtracted 10 basis points from the credit market." Consecutive sentences of increasing obscurity became his solution. A congressman would move on, assuming he'd been answered.
Eventually the method got a name: Fedspeak. Chairman Ben Bernanke and Chair Janet Yellen later abandoned the approach in favor of direct communication. Jerome Powell began press conferences with plain-English summaries in 2018.
