Alan Greenspan dies at 100, the man who transformed the modern US economy
As chairman of the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan became the world's most renowned banker for nearly two decades.
June 23, 2026 - 9:49 am
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For nearly 20 years, Alan Greenspan was responsible for protecting the US economy and maintaining the strength of the dollar.
As chairman of the Federal Reserve (Fed, as the US central bank is known in English) from 1987 to 2006, he oversaw the longest period of sustained economic growth in the United States in a generation.
This Monday, Greenspan died at age 100, according to his wife, Andrea Mitchell, correspondent for the US network NBC News.
In a statement released by that outlet, Mitchell explained that her husband died from complications of Parkinson's disease.
The statement described Greenspan as "a giant, who helped shape the US economy for decades under presidents of both parties, but who was always sincere in acknowledging his mistakes."
Described as the "God in the machine of American finance," Greenspan turned down all interview requests during his time as Fed chairman, a position considered the second most important after the presidency.
However, the media and financial markets clung to his scarce public statements, and a sign in his office simply read: "The buck starts here."
This phrase can be translated as "the dollar starts here," but also as "the responsibility starts here," and Greenspan used it as a nod to the expression "The buck stops here," popularized by President Harry Truman.
But critics argue that an over-reliance on easy credit during his tenure fueled the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s and triggered the subprime mortgage crisis of 2008.
President Nixon opened the doors of government to Alan Greenspan.
The Federal Reserve stated that Greenspan's policies and economic thinking "left a lasting mark on this institution, on the broader field of economics, and on the country."
"He brought rigorous analytical discipline to the formulation of monetary policy and helped establish the credibility that remains one of the Federal Reserve's most important assets," the central bank said in a statement issued Monday.
The Fed added that his legacy endures in the institution through the economists and public servants he trained and inspired, as well as the frameworks and practices he helped shape.
Musician and libertarian
Alan Greenspan was born in New York City on March 6, 1926. His mother, who worked in a furniture store, raised him alone.
In his youth, rather than standing out as a budding economist, Greenspan was a talented musician who studied clarinet at the prestigious Juilliard School of Music in New York.
He played in a band with Stan Getz, the legendary jazz saxophonist, before touring the country with the Henry Jerome orchestra.
This itinerant lifestyle gave him a valuable practical understanding of how business works in the United States.
And while his fellow musicians spent the nights smoking marijuana, Greenspan kept himself busy studying economics and keeping the band's accounts.
At age 19, he enrolled as an economics student at New York University, where he became a free-market advocate and eventually found work as an economic consultant and later as a member of the board of directors of JP Morgan.
The ideas of novelist and libertarian philosopher Ayn Rand—who appears in the center of this image alongside Greenspan and President Gerald Ford—influenced the economic thinking of the former Fed chairman.
In 1952, Greenspan met novelist and right-wing social philosopher Ayn Rand, whose ideas would have a profound influence on him.
She nicknamed him "the undertaker" because of his preference for dark, sober suits.
But the young economist came to support her belief that society functions most efficiently when people actively pursue their own interests, to the detriment of the interests of society as a whole.
In an article he wrote in 1966, he declared that "the welfare state" is "nothing more than a mechanism by which governments confiscate the wealth of productive members of society."
Taming inflation
President Reagan announced the appointment of Alan Greenspan as chairman of the Federal Reserve in 1987.
Having successfully forecast the Eisenhower-era recession, Greenspan advised Richard Nixon during his successful 1968 presidential campaign.
He later became head of the Council of Economic Advisers.
Later, Greenspan would write that he considered the president "sadly paranoid, misanthropic, and cynical," but the economist's success in containing inflation impressed Nixon's successors.
Upon assuming the presidency after Nixon's resignation, Gerald Ford asked Greenspan to continue on the Council of Economic Advisers, and in the early 1980s, Ronald Reagan chose him to head a commission tasked with reforming the US public pension system.
In August 1987, Reagan appointed him chairman of the Federal Reserve of the United States, and over the next two decades, he became one of the most powerful men in the world.
The golden age
At the helm of the Fed, Greenspan was forced to face a difficult situation from the very beginning.
His skillful handling of the stock market crash of October 1987, which wiped out more than 30% of stock value, earned him much praise.
His statement of confidence in the underlying strength of the economy calmed rattled nerves, and his facilitation of cheap credit helped keep banks afloat.
It was an approach he used again and again whenever markets experienced a crisis.
Later called "quantitative easing," this type of intervention included the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s, the first Gulf War, the Mexican peso crisis, and—shortly after he retired—the global credit crisis of 2008.
Greenspan was reaffirmed as Fed chairman by George H. W. Bush, although the president later complained that a slow economic recovery had frustrated his reelection chances.
Surprisingly, Bill Clinton—a Democratic president—also asked the austere monetarist to remain in office.
But his decision paid off, as under Greenspan's direction, a golden age of growth followed in the late 1990s.
Later, Greenspan praised Clinton in his memoirs for the president's "consistent and disciplined focus on long-term economic growth," while criticizing that some Republican administrations simply lost control of public spending.
Alan Greenspan dated television star Barbara Walters in the late 1970s.
Outside of work, the rather dour-looking banker was a skilled and enthusiastic tennis player.
He had a first marriage that lasted less than a year to a Canadian artist.
Then, Greenspan dated television star Barbara Walters before marrying NBC reporter Andrea Mitchell in 1997.
That same year, the spectacular collapse of the economies of Southeast Asia—the so-called "Asian tigers"—again put him to the test.
By cutting interest rates in the United States, he showed his conviction that the situation would recover, and in doing so, he helped the global economy.
Bubbles and crashes
Something very similar happened when many dot-com companies, overvalued by investors, failed to meet expectations and went bankrupt in March 2000.
The market, according to Greenspan, had shown "irrational exuberance."
The Fed raised interest rates and then quickly cut them after consumers sharply reduced their spending.
But Greenspan was criticized for the low-interest-rate culture that had allowed the dot-com bubble to grow in the first place.
Nobel laureate Paul Krugman was one of the critics.
"He didn't raise interest rates to curb market enthusiasm," Krugman complained, "he waited for the bubble to burst... and tried to clean up the mess afterwards."
Greenspan drastically cut interest rates after the September 11, 2001 attacks and urged President George W. Bush to overthrow Saddam Hussein.
After the September 11, 2001 attacks in the United States, he sharply cut interest rates to shore up the US economy and urged George W. Bush to overthrow Saddam Hussein, in case the Iraqi dictator caused chaos in global energy markets.
In 2006, Greenspan left his position as Fed chairman after an unprecedented five terms.
A year later came a downturn in the US housing market that the Fed had not predicted.
The subprime mortgage crisis eventually caused banks to fail and triggered the worst global economic recession since the Great Depression.
Critics said Greenspan's low-interest-rate policy after 9/11 had fueled a sharp rise in housing prices and overly enthusiastic mortgage lending by banks.
It was also said that his aversion to banking regulation—as well as these institutions' practice of using complex financial instruments like derivatives to insure loans—worsened the problem.
Greenspan testified before Congress after the global economic collapse of 2008.
In October 2008, Greenspan admitted that he had placed too much faith in the free market and had paid insufficient attention to the dangers of subprime lending.
He said he had believed the financial sector could be trusted to "self-regulate," because it would always be in its own interest to do so.
In his testimony before Congress, the former Fed chairman acknowledged that the banks had proven his ideas of free market and anti-regulation wrong.
"I found a flaw. I don't know how significant or permanent it is. But this fact has distressed me very much," he said.
Alan Greenspan will be remembered as the man who—more than any other—shaped the modern US economy.
For 20 years, a succession of presidents and many ordinary Americans considered him a financial guru and a talisman against hard times.
Alan Greenspan was an influential economic voice into his tenth decade of life.
Throughout his extraordinary career, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in Washington and received an honorary knighthood from Queen Elizabeth II.
He remained a highly sought-after economic advisor and media commentator well into his 90s.
He was not supportive of President Trump's first administration and described his populist approach as a "scream of pain" that would do little to raise living standards.
He also criticized the United Kingdom's decision to leave the European Union, calling Brexit the "worst outcome."
A few years before his centenary, he reappeared on television warning that the Biden administration was raising interest rates too quickly in 2023.
In March 2026, Greenspan turned 100.
With his air of Olympian detachment, Greenspan will be remembered for his long stewardship of the US economy, during which GDP contracted only once.
However, for his critics, his reputation was tarnished by his philosophical antipathy toward regulation and by two major market crashes.
