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It's hard to remember that anyone was the chairman of the Fed (short for "Federal Reserve") before Alan Greenspan. His stewardship of U.S. monetary policy has coincided with a long, impressive expansion of the American economy. To put it simply: Greenspan is a superstar -- reappointed not once, but twice, by a president from the opposite political party. To find out who headed the Fed before Greenspan, we did a multiword search using the phrase "fed chairman before alan greenspan" (without the quotes). The results included hundreds of links. After clicking on several, we realized we weren't getting anywhere. We decided to switch things around, entering a number of variations on the above words.
We even tried using a very specific phrase, "chairman before greenspan" (with quotes), but that search came up completely empty. Strike two. We changed our bias (from searching to browsing) and headed for the Yahoo! directory. We navigated down to Social Science > Economics > Economic Policies and took a look around. Maybe the FOMC had its own site. Maybe there was a historical overview. We crossed our fingers. Our best shot seemed to be United States Monetary Policy, from the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. There we found several pages of information on the FOMC
(Federal Open Market Committee), the members of the Fed that control interest rates, including a fascinating look inside the committee's monthly meetings. At our wit's end, we decided to revisit our original strategy and searched on "FOMC predecessor." There were 17 results. We clicked on the first one and read a paragraph or two. Then we searched the document for the word "predecessor" and, lo and behold, there he was -- Paul Volcker, waiting for us in the sentence, "Chairman Greenspan's predecessor, Paul Volcker, was first appointed by Jimmy Carter, a Democrat, and then reappointed by President Reagan." Whew. Moral of the story:
Persistence pays off. Don't get stuck in a searching rut. Don't be afraid to change strategies or search terms, especially if you're confident that the information is out there somewhere. Want to test our advice? Try to find out who played shortstop for the Baltimore Orioles before Cal Ripken. Now that's a tough question.
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