Did you know? Alan Greenspan and Ayn Rand were close friends

Alan Greenspan’s relationship with Ayn Rand is highlighted as one of the most significant intellectual connections in the former central banker’s life, with the two remaining friends until Rand’s death in 1982. The article says Greenspan and Rand met when he was in his mid-twenties and she in her forties, introduced through Greenspan’s then-wife, the Canadian art historian Joan Mitchell. Mitchell was described as a close friend of Nathaniel Branden’s wife; Branden was Rand’s longtime protege and lover. Greenspan and Mitchell married in 1952 but divorced within a year, while the Greenspan–Rand friendship endured. Through the Branden connection, Greenspan joined Rand’s “Collective,” a small group that gathered at Rand’s Midtown Manhattan apartment to discuss politics and ideas. In Greenspan’s 2007 memoir, The Age of Turbulence, Rand nicknamed him “the undertaker.”