{"id":753204,"date":"2026-06-22T16:25:16","date_gmt":"2026-06-22T16:25:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/753204\/"},"modified":"2026-06-22T16:25:16","modified_gmt":"2026-06-22T16:25:16","slug":"alan-greenspan-death-former-us-federal-reserve-chairman-alan-greenspan-dies-at-100","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/753204\/","title":{"rendered":"Alan Greenspan death: Former US Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan dies at 100"},"content":{"rendered":"

US<\/a> Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan has died at the age of 100.<\/p>\n

He died on Monday from complications of Parkinson\u2019s disease<\/a>, said his wife of 29 years, NBC News correspondent Andrea Mitchell.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan testifies on Capitol Hill in Washington, Wednesday, April 7, 2010, before the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission .\u00a0AP Photo\/J. Scott Applewhite, file<\/p>\n

\u201cTo me he was my husband, who shaped my life from our very first date in 1984,\u201d Mitchell said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cHe had \u2018irrational exuberance\u2019 for baseball<\/a>, the Washington Commanders, tennis<\/a>, golf<\/a>, and music, especially jazz.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe will be remembered for his brilliance and his kindness. Being his life partner was the joy of my life.\u201d<\/p>\n

In his 18\u00bd years at the helm of the Fed, Greenspan presided over a sustained era of American growth and prosperity, yet one that ended with devastating consequences in 2008, two years after he had left the central bank.<\/p>\n

Greenspan was so respected during his many years as head of the world\u2019s most influential central bank that by the time he stepped down in 2006, he was widely celebrated as the \u201cOracle\u201d and \u201cMaestro\u201d.<\/p>\n

Greenspan\u2019s reputation suffered a serious setback however, when the American housing market collapsed, igniting a global financial crisis that nearly toppled the US banking system and plunged the economy into the worst recession since the 1930s.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan appears before the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee on Capitol Hill Wednesday, April 6, 2005\u00a0AP<\/p>\n

Critics pinned much of the blame for the crisis on Greenspan\u2019s easy-money<\/a> policies and on what they believed was an overexuberant faith in lightly supervised financial markets.<\/p>\n

Greenspan himself later acknowledged that \u201cI made a mistake\u2033\u2063 in assuming the nation\u2019s banks, whose stability undergirds the financial system and the entire economy, could essentially regulate themselves.<\/p>\n

Until then, however, it seemed that Greenspan could do no wrong. Not only in the United States but across the world, he was regarded with a mixture of reverence and awe. Many even openly dreaded the day when he would leave the Fed.<\/p>\n

Investors hung on his sometimes inscrutable observations. In the most well-known such remark, Greenspan sent financial markets reeling on December 5, 1996, when he suggested with just two words \u2014 \u201cirrational exuberance\u201d \u2014 that stock prices were too high.<\/p>\n

Mindful of his power to move markets, Greenspan typically resorted to obfuscation. At times, he even satirised his habit of doing so.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cI know you believe you understand what you think I said, but I am not sure you realise that what you heard is not what I meant,\u201d Greenspan once told a befuddled congressional committee.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Alan Greenspan chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, chats with newsmen prior to his appearance on NBC’s Meet the Press, September 29, 1974.\u00a0AP Photo\/Bob Daugherty, file<\/p>\n

Born in the Washington Heights neighbourhood of Manhattan, the young Greenspan was a math whiz who was trotted out by his mother to show off for visitors.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was a prop at parties,\u2033\u2063 he said in a 2007 interview with PBS NewsHour. A Julliard School dropout, he worked as a professional musician in his teens, playing clarinet and saxophone alongside the future jazz great Stan Getz \u2014 a humbling experience that persuaded the young Greenspan to seek another line of work.<\/p>\n

He pursued undergraduate and graduate study in economics at New York<\/a> University, eventually earning a doctorate there. For most of three decades, he ran an economic consulting firm. During the 1950s, he became a disciple of the libertarian philosopher Ayn Rand, who stuck him with the nickname the \u201cUndertaker\u2033\u2063 for his dark clothes and quiet bearing. When Greenspan was sworn in as President Gerald Ford\u2019s chief economic adviser in 1974, Rand stood beside him.<\/p>\n

President Ronald Reagan tapped Greenspan to run the Fed in 1987. He was tested almost immediately. On October 19, 1987, which came to be known as \u201cBlack Monday\u201d, the stock market suffered the worst one-day percentage loss in American history<\/a> just two months into his term. The Dow Jones Industrial Average shed 22.6 per cent of its value rapidly for reasons that weren\u2019t entirely clear then, and remain opaque to this day.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Economist Alan Greenspan, chairman of the Federal Reserve from 1987 to 2006, is seen in his office in Washington, Friday, October 18, 2013.\u00a0AP Photo\/J. Scott Applewhite<\/p>\n

Greenspan won credit for helping restore calm and stability. He assured Wall Street that the Fed would supply as much money to the financial system as was needed to restore calm. Stocks recovered, and the American economy emerged unscathed by the market crash<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Greenspan\u2019s crisis management skills were tested again in 1997 and 1998, when a financial crisis in Asia<\/a> threatened to spread economic devastation around the globe. Under Greenspan, the Fed arranged an emergency loan to Thailand<\/a> in the early stages of the crisis and persuaded US banks to roll over short-term loans to a teetering South Korea<\/a>.<\/p>\n

During his tenure at the Fed, Greenspan drew praise for presiding over what was at the time the longest economic expansion in American history \u2014 a 10-year streak of prosperity that ran from March 1991 to March 2001. Over that time, the nation\u2019s unemployment rate briefly dropped below 4 per cent for the first time since 1970.<\/p>\n

And inflation, which had bedevilled the United States and much of the global economy during the 1970s, was remarkably dormant during Greenspan\u2019s chairmanship, something many economists had not thought could occur for so long a period.<\/p>\n

During the long boom, Greenspan argued that improvements in technology<\/a> had made the economy so efficient that it could run faster, at lower rates of unemployment, without unleashing inflation. As a consequence, the theory went, the Fed could keep interest rates<\/a> low even when the economy was roaring.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

President Reagan congratulates Alan Greenspan after he was sworn-in as new chairman of the Federal Reserve Board during a ceremony at the White House in this Aug. 11, 1987.\u00a0AP Photo\/Barry Thumma, file<\/p>\n

As Fed chair, Greenspan relished poring over obscure economic data, from monthly boxcar loadings to steel production, all in a bid to assess where the economy was headed. He would often phone economists at other government<\/a> agencies to discuss details. He would rise early each morning for a two-hour soak in his bathtub, time that he used to review statistics and Fed staff memos.<\/p>\n

Improbably, Greenspan also made the gossip pages as something of an unlikely ladies\u2019 man. He dated the television<\/a> journalist Barbara Walters and later married Andrea Mitchell of NBC News after a 12-year courtship. They had no children<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Greenspan had dated Walters while working as an adviser to President Gerald Ford. According to a biography of Greenspan, The Man Who Knew by Sebastian Mallaby, when Ford read a newspaper item about the pair, he cut it out and sent it to his chief of staff, Dick Cheney, with a note that said, \u201cI don\u2019t believe it\u201d.<\/p>\n

All along, Greenspan held fast to the belief that financial markets could largely regulate themselves. With officials from President Bill Clinton\u2019s White House, he helped block efforts by Brooksley Born, the nation\u2019s top commodities regulator, to bring federal oversight in the late 1990s to the shadowy market in over-the-counter derivatives. The derivatives allowed speculators to make bets on everything from the price of oil to high-risk mortgages.<\/p>\n

Eventually, history would vindicate Born, not the Maestro.<\/p>\n

The low interest rates Greenspan had engineered helped swell housing prices into a dangerous bubble. And the financial deregulation he supported allowed banks and other financial firms to pile up huge risks, often hidden from government supervision. Bad derivatives bets helped sink insurance giant American International Group, which required a $US180 billion ($256.68 billion) taxpayer bailout.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan, centre, and White House Chief of Staff John Sununu look on as President George Bush gestures while meeting with economic advisors in the Cabinet Room of the White House in 1991.\u00a0AP Photo\/Doug Mills, file<\/p>\n

The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, which was assigned to investigate the debacle by Congress, concluded: \u201cOver 30 years of deregulation and reliance on self-regulation by financial institutions, championed by former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan and others … had stripped away key safeguards, which could have helped avoid catastrophe.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the years after stepping down as Fed chairman in 2006 just shy of his 80th birthday, Greenspan kept busy doing what he loved to do most \u2014 following the economic data. He ran his own consulting firm, Greenspan Associates, through which he dispensed advice to Wall Street clients and collected handsome speaking fees.<\/p>\n

He kept up a busy schedule well into his 90s, writing his memoir and two other books on the economy, as well as opining on the latest economic developments on television news shows.<\/p>\n

He also signed onto opinion articles and statements defending the Federal Reserve\u2019s political independence from President Donald Trump<\/a>\u2019s ongoing attacks. In January 2026 he signed a statement criticising the Trump administration\u2019s investigation of Fed Chair Jerome Powell. <\/p>\n

The statement, which was also signed by two other former Fed chairs and five former Treasury secretaries, called the investigation \u201can unprecedented attempt to use prosecutorial attacks to undermine\u201d the Fed\u2019s independence and warned it would have \u201chighly negative consequences for inflation.\u201d<\/p>\n

Greenspan\u2019s tenure as Fed chairman \u2013 from August 1987 through January 2006 \u2013 was just five months shy of the longest Fed chairman\u2019s tenure. That distinction belonged to William McChesney Martin, who served from 1951 until early 1970.<\/p>\n

In his 2013 book, The Map and the Territory, Greenspan defended himself against critics who assigned him significant blame for the 2008 financial meltdown. He argued that traditional economic forecasting was no match for the irrational risk-taking that can feed catastrophic price bubbles.<\/p>\n

\u201cBubbles go up very slowly as euphoria builds,\u201d Greenspan said in a 2013 interview with The Associated Press.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThen fear hits, and it comes down very sharply. When I started to look at that, I was sort of intellectually shocked.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"US Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan has died at the age of 100. He died on Monday from…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":753205,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[64,63,99],"class_list":["post-753204","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-business","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-business"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/753204","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=753204"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/753204\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/753205"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=753204"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=753204"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=753204"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}