This book is in part a detective story. After 9/11 I knew, if I needed further reinforcement, that we are living in a new world — the world of a global capitalist economy that is vastly more flexible, resilient, open, self-correcting, and fast-changing than it was even a quarter of a century earlier. It's a world that presents us with enormous new possibilities but also enormous new challenges. The Age of Turbulence is my attempt to understand the nature of this new world: how we got here, what we're living through, and what lies over the horizon, for good and for ill.

The first half is my effort to retrace the arc of my learning curve, and the second half is a more objective effort to use this as a foundation on which to erect a conceptual framework for understanding the new global economy.

I don't pretend to know all the answers. But from my vantage point at the Federal Reserve, I had privileged access to the best that had been thought and said on a wide range of subjects. I have not been inhibited in reaching for some fairly sweeping hypotheses.