Alan Greenspan, the towering figure who steered US monetary policy for nearly two decades as chair of the Federal Reserve, has died aged 100. His wife, NBC News correspondent Andrea Mitchell, said in a statement reported by her employer that Greenspan died from complications of Parkinson's disease.
Mitchell described her husband 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”. The Fed said in a statement on Monday that its former chair “brought rigorous analytical discipline to monetary policymaking and helped establish the credibility that remains one of the Federal Reserve’s most important assets”.
“Alan Greenspan, former Federal Reserve chair, dies aged 100 from Parkinson's complications.”
Greenspan chaired the Federal Reserve from 1987 to 2006, serving under presidents Ronald Reagan, George HW Bush, Bill Clinton and George W Bush. The role, described as the second most important after the presidency, made him the world’s most high-profile banker. He was lionised during his tenure, presiding over the longest sustained period of economic growth in a generation. Critics, however, argue that his policies of easy credit fuelled the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s and led to the sub-prime mortgage crisis of 2008. 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 Alan Greenspan and others … had stripped away key safeguards”.
Greenspan later acknowledged having “made a mistake” in believing US banks could effectively regulate themselves. But he defended himself, arguing in his 2013 book that traditional forecasting could not match the irrational risk-taking that feeds bubbles. “Bubbles go up very slowly as euphoria builds,” he told the Associated Press in an interview that year. “Then fear hits, and it comes down very sharply. When I started to look at that, I was sort of intellectually shocked.”
Born in New York City on 6 March 1926, Greenspan was raised single-handedly by his mother, who worked in a furniture store. He was a talented clarinetist, studying at Juilliard and playing in a band with saxophonist Stan Getz before touring with the Henry Jerome Band. The peripatetic life gave him insight into US business, and while fellow musicians smoked marijuana, he studied economics and did the band’s accounts. At 19, he enrolled at New York University, earning bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees in economics. He became an apostle of the free market and met right-wing novelist Ayn Rand in 1952, whose views profoundly influenced him. She called him “the undertaker” because of his dark suits.
Greenspan spent three decades running an economic consulting firm before his appointment to the Fed. During his tenure, he declined all interview requests, and a sign in his office read “the buck starts here”. The media and money markets hung on his every public word. But the collapse of the housing market shortly after he left office triggered a devastating financial crisis, prompting a re-evaluation of his legacy. “He will be remembered for his brilliance and his kindness,” Mitchell’s statement said. The Fed noted that his legacy lives on through the economists he mentored. Yet the question of whether his policies sowed the seeds of the 2008 crisis remains unresolved.