\n \u201cHe was a giant of a man who helped shape the U.S. economy for decades under presidents of both parties, but was always honest in acknowledging his mistakes,\u201d she said.\n <\/p>\n
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\n Born in New York City, Greenspan taught economics in the 1950s at New York University, his alma mater, while he was chairman and president of economic consulting firm Townsend-Greenspan & Co. that he helped run for 21 years. He served as the director of domestic policy research with Richard Nixon\u2019s 1968 presidential campaign and was a part-time adviser to him after he took office.\n <\/p>\n
\n In 1974, the final year of the Nixon administration, Greenspan became chairman of the President\u2019s Council of Economic Advisers and stayed throughout the tenure of President Gerald Ford. He returned to his economic consulting work after Ford\u2019s 1976 defeat and continued until his appointment to the Fed.\n <\/p>\n
\n \u201cIt\u2019s a sad day for the Fed,\u201d Fed Governor Christopher Waller said Monday at an event at the US central bank. The Fed also released a statement reflecting on the former chairman\u2019s legacy.\n <\/p>\n
\n \u201cChairman Greenspan\u2019s legacy endures at the Federal Reserve \u2014 in those he mentored directly, in the economists and public servants he inspired, and in the frameworks and practices he helped shape,\u201d the statement said.\n <\/p>\n
\n Two months into Greenspan\u2019s tenure, the stock market suffered its largest one-day percentage decline, when the Dow plunged 22% on October 19, 1987, a day that became known as \u201cBlack Monday.\u201d The next day, Greenspan announced that the Fed was ready \u201cto serve as a source of liquidity to support the economic and financial systems.\u201d His assurance helped the market begin to make a relatively quick recovery.\n <\/p>\n
\n During his time at the Fed, the US economy experienced one of the strongest peacetime economic expansions in its history. Unemployment fell below 4%, the stock market reached what were then record highs, and the federal government began running budget surpluses rather than deficits.\n <\/p>\n
\n After the bursting of the dot-com bubble in 2000, the economy slipped into a recession in 2001 and was further shaken by the September 11 terrorist attacks. That prompted Greenspan and the Fed to cut its key interest rate to levels previously unheard of then, eventually reaching 1%.\n <\/p>\n
\n Many economists say that those low rates helped inflate the housing bubble, encouraging investors to give mortgages to borrowers who would not previously have qualified for home loans. People also criticized the Fed for not exercising better oversight of the mortgage market during those go-go years.\n <\/p>\n
\n Greenspan dismissed talk of a housing bubble while he was in office, saying that while individual local markets might be overpriced, there was no evidence of a nationwide bubble.\n <\/p>\n
\n But when home values collapsed nationwide and foreclosures and bank failures soared in the fall of 2008, he testified before the House Oversight Committee that he was in a \u201cstate of shocked disbelief.\u201d\n <\/p>\n
\n He said that while he had tried to warn about the riskiness of some of the home loans, the economic damage wrought by the bursting of the bubble had \u201cturned out to be much broader than anything I could have imagined.\u201d\n <\/p>\n
\n He later testified that the low interest rates he and the Fed set did not cause the housing bubble or the ensuing crisis and he believed he had been right 70% of the time when he was in office.\n <\/p>\n
![\"United](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/220811164111-24-alan-greenspan-unf.jpg\")
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\n During his time at the Fed, Greenspan\u2019s public comments became famous for their dense, difficult-to-understand prose, forcing investors to struggle to decipher what he meant. That was no accident.\n <\/p>\n
\n \u201cI spend a substantial amount of my time endeavoring to fend off questions, and worry terribly that I might end up being too clear,\u201d he told the New York Times in 1995.\n <\/p>\n
\n At the same time, he also made the Fed\u2019s actions more transparent. The central bank had never issued policy statements at the end of its rate-setting meetings until Greenspan instituted the practice in 1999.\n <\/p>\n
\n One of his most famous comments came in 1996, when he warned that investors were driving up the price of stocks because of \u201cirrational exuberance.\u201d The comment briefly rattled world markets, although the rise in tech stocks continued for another four years.\n <\/p>\n
\n Mitchell\u2019s statement Monday made reference to that famous statement.\n <\/p>\n
\n \u201cTo me he was my husband, who shaped my life from our very first date in 1984. He had \u2018irrational exuberance\u2019 for baseball, the Washington Commanders, tennis, golf and music, especially jazz,\u201d Mitchell added. \u201cHe will be remembered for his brilliance and his kindness. Being his life partner was the joy of my life.\u201d\n <\/p>\n
\n During the economic boom of the late 1990s and early 2000, Greenspan was widely praised for the nation\u2019s economic success. Bob Woodward\u2019s 2000 book on him was titled \u201cMaestro: Greenspan\u2019s Fed and the American Boom.\u201d\n <\/p>\n
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Alan Greenspan’s life in pictures<\/p>\n
\n Greenspan deserves a great deal of credit for being among the first to see the impact that the internet and personal computer would have on the economy in the 1990s, Kevin Hassett, director of the National Economic Council told CNBC Monday morning. That insight helped convince the Fed to allow the economy to run hotter than it otherwise might have.\n <\/p>\n
\n \u201cHe was just an absolutely brilliant mind who saw the computer revolution happening before anyone else did,\u201d said Hassett, who was a young economist working for the Fed in the 1990s. \u201cAnd if you go back and look at the history of the American economy going back over the last 50 years, I think Greenspan\u2019s judgment to leave the economy alone, and let the internet boom happen, and the productivity boom from internet happen\u2026.that judgment created an enormous amount of wealth and prosperity for our country.\u201d\n <\/p>\n
\n Queen Elizabeth II bestowed upon Greenspan the honorary title Knight of the British Empire in 2002, citing him for his \u201cwisdom and skill\u201d and \u201cfor his outstanding contribution to global economic stability.\u201d Shortly before he left office in 2005, Greenspan was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Bush.\n <\/p>\n
\n After leaving the Fed, Greenspan ran a Washington economic consulting firm, Greenspan Associates LLC, serving as an adviser to major financial firms. He also gave speeches and wrote a memoir, \u201cThe Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World,\u201d which was published in the fall of 2007, just before the beginning of the recession that tarnished his reputation.\n <\/p>\n
\n His most recent book, published in 2018, was \u201cCapitalism in America: A History.\u201d\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Summary Alan Greenspan, who led the Federal Reserve for almost 19 years under four presidents, has died at…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":753628,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[45,49,48],"class_list":["post-753627","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-business","tag-business","tag-ca","tag-canada"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/753627","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=753627"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/753627\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/753628"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=753627"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=753627"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=753627"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}