"Verbal masturbation." Yep.
In an interview with Alan Greenspan in last week's issue of Businessweek, Greenspan talked about the meaning of "constructive ambiguity":
"As Fed chairman, every time I expressed a view, I added or subtracted 10 basis points from the credit market. That was not helpful. But I nonetheless had to testify before Congress. On questions that were too market-sensitive to answer, "no comment" was indeed an answer. And so you construct what we used to call Fed-speak. ...I would catch myself in the middle of a sentence. ...I would continue on resolving the sentence in some obscure way which made it incomprehensible. But nobody was quite sure I wasn't saying something profound when I wasn't. And that became the so-called Fed-speak of which I became an expert over the years. It's a self-protection mechanism ...you've got to be careful about the nuances of what you're going to say and what you don't say."
So he traded credibility for reduced volatility. To keep the markets from going up or down on what he said, he elected to say nothing, while pretending to be saying something. It reminds me of the saying, "If you can't dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit." This passes for leadership.
Anyone remember the movie, "Being There"?