IT was probably only a matter of time before Alan Greenspan and Bill Gross found one another. Or entered into a mutually beneficial relationship.No two people garner as much media attention when it comes to Federal Reserve policy and interest rates as the former Fed chief (still, 15 months after he retired from the Fed) and the chief investment officer of Pacific Investment Management Co., based in Newport Beach, California, and home of the largest bond fund. (Full disclosure: About five percent of my Bloomberg 401(k) account is in Gross's Total Return Bond Fund.)

With Greenspan signing on as an adviser to Pimco, we can look forward to some "economies of scale" from the merger. For news organisations, for example, that means headline consolidation.

What other benefits might derive from the G&G combination? There's a chance the different styles of self-expression (Pimco's, long and windy; Greenspan's, terse and opaque) could produce a whole that is more palatable than the sum of its parts.

Then again, the combined assets could also lose value. We aren't likely to see official transcripts of Pimco's quarterly strategic outlook sessions and regular conference calls with Greenspan. (No doubt we'll get a leak here and there to help the reputation and/or positions of the partners.)

How about the combination of Greenspan's forecasting acumen, gleaned from more than 50 years of watching the ebb and flow of the US economy (and a couple of 100-year storms), and Pimco's Fed-watching capabilities? Can bad plus bad equal good?

In the fall of 2004, with the Fed's overnight benchmark rate at 1.75 percent, Pimco's Paul McCulley, who manages several short-term funds, was pushing the idea that the neutral funds rate — a rate that neither stimulates nor restrains the economy — was 2.5 percent.

On December 14, 2004, when the Fed raised the funds rate to 2.25 percent, the fifth quarter-point increase in six months, McCulley said the Fed was "getting close to having finished the journey away from accommodative and toward neutral".

The journey took another 18 months and 325 basis points. McCulley's performance was certainly better than his forecast. Pimco's Short-Term Fund ranked in the top 35 percent of comparable funds for the last three years, with an average annualised return of 3.4 percent, according to Morningstar Inc.

Greenspan gets high grades for managing the economy, for rescuing it once disaster struck. His track record on forecasting, his ability to use those reams of data to see into the future, is less notable. He pooh-poohed the idea that the US economy was in recession in late 1990 after it had already started. He was late to the party in 2000 as well, cutting rates aggressively in 2001 after he was tipped off that businesses were in trouble. And he was still worried about deflation in 2003 just as the economy was lifting off.

While the G&G merger is a natural in certain respects — big names leveraging off one another — it's counterintuitive in another. Gross has been an outspoken critic of Greenspan.

In an October 26, 2005, BusinessWeek interview, Gross said he preferred Greenspan's successor, Ben Bernanke. He criticised Greenspan's tendency of "lowering rates whenever there was a crisis," which created excess leverage, "bailed out the market" and "led to various bubbles" — first in technology and internet stocks and then in residential real estate.

"That approach in the long term is destabilising," Gross said. "It promotes speculative activity. That's the corner that Greenspan has painted the economy into."

That's hardly a glowing endorsement. Now Gross wants Greenspan in his corner? Why?

Gross clearly isn't looking for trading tips or hedging strategies from the Maestro (unless it's tips on hedging a forecast). With $680 billion under management, the lion's share in fixed-income, Gross doesn't need another big name to attract investors. His $104 billion Total Return Fund outperformed 97 percent of its peers over the past 10 years, with a 6.9 percent average annualised return, according to Morningstar. That includes poor results the last 12 months, when Gross lagged behind three-quarters of comparable bond funds.

His quibbles with Greenspan's policies notwithstanding, Gross was apparently eager to hook the Big Fish once he was a free agent. On February 21, 2006, he told Bloomberg News that Pimco had invited Greenspan out to speak "because he is intelligent and has a command of the current situation. We would love to have him as a consultant or as an adviser".

Yesterday's Wall Street Journal reported that as part of the agreement, Greenspan would not take on "any Pimco competitor as a consulting client".

In the universe of bond funds, who would that disqualify? Everyone. Gross snagged Greenspan before anyone else could.

(Caroline Baum, author of "Just What I Said," is a columnist for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are her own.)