Ground Floor: Generally, when you leave a job, someone senior to you in the office might say a few words, or make a presentation, or you might all just go down to the pub for the traditional Irish departure ceremony of a booze-up.
Whatever way, though, it's usually over in a few hours.
Not so with the long farewell to Alan Greenspan which kicked off last week at the Jackson Hole symposium "The Greenspan era: lessons for the future" where a cabal of central bankers listened to the Great Man himself give his reflections on central banking to a rapt audience.
Greenspan's 18 years at the helm of the Federal Reserve comes to an end next January and provided the US economy doesn't slip on a very badly timed banana skin, he will be regarded as one of the most successful presidents of the US Federal Reserve.
His talk last week focused on what developments over the last 18 years were the most important in changing the way the Fed approached and implemented monetary policy.
At its most simple, he recognised that expectations were extremely important. He knew that if people were anticipating an event, they acted accordingly ahead of the event itself; as a result, the Federal Reserve under Greenspan tried to manage those expectations by being transparent about its policy actions and the reasons for them (thus making ever more popular the trading mantra of "buy the rumour, sell the fact").
Greenspan also took time out on this occasion to consider asset prices, saying that the Fed was now paying closer attention to rising values because the current low interest rate environment is encouraging people to take more risks. Since the bursting of the dotcom bubble at the beginning of this decade, a more measured rise in stock prices has been the case but property prices in the US have been moving relentlessly higher.
There is a growing concern in the States that the property market has entered its own bubble but Greenspan has argued that it's almost impossible to identify a bubble before it bursts. And, of course, bubbles can last a long time, as Irish property investors know.
Greenspan's critics say he is too complacent about asset prices, so perhaps his recent comments point to a change in direction for the Fed. He has also warned investors about the complacency of basing investment decisions on wealth rather than income.
The markets are still listening to Greenspan, but the attention is already shifting towards his successor. There are a number of names in the frame and - as with all things market-led - you can simply bet on your choice or you can approach it another way by buying or selling contracts on the likely future chairman. Currently the odds (from www.paddypower.com ) on former Bush aide Glenn Hubbard are 9-4 and former chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, Martin Feldstein, at 4-1, while the frontrunner is Fed governor Ben Bernanke, who was sworn in as chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers last June. Bernanke, a Harvard and MIT man, is currently quoted at 5-4.
He maintains his favourite spot on www.tradesports.com, too, where the bid-ask spread on him is 31.0-37.0. Apparently most of the market-participant money has been going on Bernanke, but the administration has said that the process of finding a successor to Greenspan is merely at the "loose stage of gathering names".
I know that George Bush will not be appointing his next Federal Reserve chairman based on looks (with George, who knows?), but if so the odds on Bernanke might actually be a little ungenerous. Greenspan, with his big black spectacles, has a definite banker look about him. Paul Volker was also a specs wearer. So are Martin Feldstein and Glenn Hubbard. But I haven't yet seen a picture of Bernanke in glasses. And not only that - he's still sporting an economist's beard! (In my central banking days all economists were bearded. It implied a level of academia lacking in the masses.)
However, I'm sure the beard is not an issue. No doubt instead of poring over pictures of Bernanke and wondering if he looks like the man for the job, George W will instead be reading some of his papers, such as Procyclical Labor Productivity and Competing Theories of the Business Cycle. Some Evidence from the US Interwar Manufacturing Industries, or perhaps the somewhat more snappily titled The Credit Crunch.
Given Greenspan's most recent outpourings of concern on asset prices, perhaps the White House will be reading, even more carefully, Bernanke's Should Central Banks Respond to Movements in Asset Prices? In fact, that might be the clinching paper given the Fed's sudden concern about asset prices.
Now that Greenspan's tenure is almost over, other economists are happy to point out that he's made mistakes in allowing the economy to get to a point where highly indebted investors are propping up prices, suggesting (not without reason) that the economy is more highly leveraged than ever and blaming Greenspan for allowing it to happen. But Feldstein (in an effort to shorten his odds, perhaps?) has championed Greenspan's approach, saying that it is the right way to deal with uncertainty.
There's no doubt that over the next few months the market participants will still listen to every word that Greenspan says. But comments from Feldstein, Bernanke, Hubbard and a whole range of others will suddenly assume a greater level of importance than ever before.
Despite the beard and that fact that he's favourite and therefore probably not worth a real punt, it's looking increasingly like Bernanke. But his unpublished manuscript might be the dealbreaker. It's entitled Bankers created the Great Depression.
