Today’s column has an imaginary marriage proposal from Alan Greenspan to his wife. I got the idea from his “60 Minutes” profile. Mrs. Greenspan — A.K.A. Andrea Mitchell — said that he had proposed to her in “Fedspeak.” I thought that was hilarious. However, the parody was too long for the syndicated column, so we had to trim it way down. Here’s the original version I wrote:

While there are significant long term risk premiums associated with such open-ended contractual arrangements, and though there is a well-documented selection bias, encouraging caution, toward measuring tangible benefits and demerits and away from historically recognized intangible concerns, there are defined loci on the time horizon when the well-informed actor, motivated by said intangibilities finds that these priorities – e.g. maximization of regalement, jocularity, binary association, et al – outweigh the downside risks, not to mention give weighted significance to the unforeseeable-but-realizable equities of commingled assets at the far horizon of secular trends as well as the wholly relative but not irrelevant worth of a certain party’s personal effulgence; to wit, would you – exigencies and externalities permitting – enter into a matrimonial association of indefinite duration with me?