Few people outside the financial world can even name a central banker, let alone quote one.

Central bankers - the men who set national interest rates - do not tend to be born comics or to favour the snappy soundbite.

But occasionally, usually during a momentous economic event, when the statistics, graphs, and scatter charts pumped out by Government institutions acquire meaning in the real world, central bankers put their number-crunching finger on it.

Mervyn King, Governor of the Bank of England, described the way ahead as “the long walk back to boredom”, playing with the title of Nelson Mandela’s autobiography to joke how economic recovery would only come when business went back to being dull and a bit dry, when banks did not go bust most days and when stock markets did not lose a tenth of their value within a few hours.

When Mr King first took over as head of the Bank of England, he told reporters that he wanted monetary policy to be “boring”, to garner few surprises and therefore, to offer economic stability. But he has had his share of non-boring moments. The man who once penned the racily entitled pamphlet A Pigovian Rule For The Optimum Provision Of Public Goods, described data emerging from one period of economic turbulence to “bear some resemblance to old-fashioned disco dancing”.

Mr King, however, is far outshone on the snappy economic comment ranks by Alan Greenspan, the former chairman of the US Federal Reserve. Just after the collapse of Enron, the energy giant, Mr Greenspan told senators in Washington that he believed America to be living in a “decade of infectious greed”.

“It’s not that humans have become any more greedy than in generations past. It is that the avenues to express greed have grown so enormously,” he said. Mr Greenspan’s comments hit home. Americans spent much of the late 1990s watching as chief executives of some of the biggest US companies were sued for fraud and for using their employer to bankroll astonishingly excessive lifestyles. One chief executive, now in prison, used company funds to buy a $6,000 shower curtain for his New York apartment.

Two years later, Mr Greenspan described the internet boom, when a stock price would double if a company changed its name to include the phrase ‘.com’, as a period of “irrational exuberance”. While the phrase is probably Mr Greenspan’s best known, unfortunately, it is not his. The phrase was taken from a conversation over a business breakfast Mr Greenspan had had weeks before, with a Yale university professor, called Robert Shiller, who later wrote a book using the phrase as the title.

Such pertinent commentary is not just left to central bankers. Henry Paulson, the US Treasury Secretary, touched a nerve this month when he said that the notion of using $700 billion of taxpayer funds to bail-out well-paid bankers, was “objectionable” and that it “stuck in my craw”. It is also ironic, given that Mr Paulson left Goldman Sachs, a beneficiary of the rescue package, to join the Treasury with around $500 million of personal wealth.

Mr Greenspan’s moments of startlingly lucid comments on economics, however, were far outweighed by his normal remarks that were so opaque, they were referred to as “Greenspeak”. Perhaps his most famous comment was that if a listener thought he understood what Mr Greenspan had just said, he probably didn’t understand it at all.

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