Alan Greenspan, the former Federal Reserve chair who oversaw nearly two decades of American economic expansion only to see his legacy tarnished by the 2008 financial crisis, has died aged 100.
His wife, NBC News correspondent Andrea Mitchell, said in a statement reported by her employer that he died from complications of Parkinson’s disease. “He will be remembered for his brilliance and his kindness,” Mitchell said.
“Former Federal Reserve chair Alan Greenspan dies aged 100 after complications from Parkinson's disease.”
Greenspan served as Fed chairman from 1987 to 2006, steering monetary policy under four presidents — Ronald Reagan, George HW Bush, Bill Clinton and George W Bush. The central bank said in a statement on Monday that Greenspan “helped establish the credibility that remains one of the Federal Reserve’s most important assets”, adding that his legacy lives on through the economists he mentored.
Born in New York City on 6 March 1926, Greenspan was raised by his mother, who worked in a furniture store. He studied clarinet at the Juilliard School of Music and played in a band with legendary jazz saxophonist Stan Getz before touring with the Henry Jerome Band. While his bandmates smoked marijuana, he studied economics and did the band’s accounts.
At 19, he enrolled at New York University, where he earned bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees in economics and became an apostle of the free market. In 1952 he met the right-wing novelist Ayn Rand, who called him “the undertaker” because of his dark suits and whose views profoundly influenced him. After three decades running an economic consulting firm, he joined the board of JP Morgan.
Mitchell’s statement described Greenspan as “a giant of a man who helped shape the US economy for decades under presidents of both parties, but was always honest in acknowledging his mistakes”.
Those mistakes became the focus of his critics. After his tenure, the housing market collapsed and the US plunged into the worst recession since the Great Depression. The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission concluded that “more than 30 years of deregulation and reliance on self-regulation by financial institutions, championed by former Federal Reserve chair Alan Greenspan and others … had stripped away key safeguards”.
Greenspan later admitted he “made a mistake” in believing banks could regulate themselves. In his 2013 book The Map and the Territory, he argued that traditional forecasting could not capture the irrational risk-taking that fuels bubbles. “Bubbles go up very slowly as euphoria builds,” he told the Associated Press that year. “Then fear hits, and it comes down very sharply.”
His 18-and-a-half-year tenure fell just five months short of the longest in Fed history. The sign in his office read simply: “the buck starts here”.