Alan Greenspan, the economist who guided US monetary policy through five presidential administrations and presided over decades of American prosperity before the 2008 financial collapse upended his legacy, has died at 100.
His wife, NBC News correspondent Andrea Mitchell, confirmed his death on Monday, citing complications from Parkinson's disease. "He will be remembered for his brilliance and his kindness," Mitchell said in a statement.
From 1987 to 2006, Greenspan served as chair of the Federal Reserve under Ronald Reagan, George HW Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W Bush. His 18.5-year tenure made him one of the longest-serving officials in the institution's history, a stretch when the economy expanded broadly and Greenspan earned a reputation as an economic oracle.
That standing crumbled when housing markets collapsed in the mid-2000s. The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission later concluded that more than three decades of deregulation championed by Greenspan and others had stripped away safeguards that might have prevented the catastrophe. The housing collapse triggered the worst recession since the Great Depression.
Greenspan eventually conceded he had "made a mistake" in believing that US banks could effectively police themselves. In his 2013 book The Map and the Territory, he reflected on how traditional economic forecasting proved inadequate against the irrational exuberance that fuels bubbles. "Bubbles go up very slowly as euphoria builds," he told the Associated Press. "Then fear hits, and it comes down very sharply. When I started to look at that, I was sort of intellectually shocked."
Before his Federal Reserve tenure, Greenspan spent three decades running an economic consulting firm. He earned a bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degree in economics from New York University and served as chief economic adviser to President Gerald Ford starting in 1974, with libertarian philosopher Ayn Rand, his intellectual hero, standing beside him at his swearing-in.
After retiring from the Fed, Greenspan remained active well into his 90s, publishing a memoir and two additional books while maintaining a presence in television commentary on economic matters. In January, he joined former Fed chairs Ben Bernanke and Janet Yellen in warning against what they called unprecedented attacks on the central bank's independence by the Trump administration, cautioning that such prosecutorial pressure in other nations had produced harmful economic consequences.
Mitchell's tribute painted a fuller portrait of the man beyond the policy battles. She noted that Greenspan had "shaped my life from our very first date in 1984" and that he brought an "irrational exuberance" to pursuits beyond economics: baseball, the Washington Commanders football team, tennis, golf, and jazz music. "Being his life partner was the joy of my life," she wrote.
Author James Rodriguez: "Greenspan's death closes a chapter on a titan whose reputation swung from maestro to cautionary tale, but whose intellectual honesty about his failures may ultimately define his legacy more than the crash itself."
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