Alan Greenspan, the world-renowned economist who led the U.S. Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors for 19 years under four different presidents, died Monday at the age of 100.
His wife, NBC journalist Andrea Mitchell, announced his death via a statement to NBC News.
“Alan passed away at our home this morning at the age of 100 from complications of Parkinson’s disease,” said Mitchell, whom he married in 1997 in a ceremony officiated by Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. “He 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.”
Greenspan, who was regarded by many in Washington as a financial “wizard,” “rock star” and “maestro” of the U.S. economy, served five terms as chair of the Federal Reserve, the world’s most influential central bank, before retiring in 2006.
“Under his leadership, the Federal Reserve achieved a sustained era of price stability that supported economic growth and helped anchor the public’s confidence in the institution,” the Fed said in a statement.
“He brought rigorous analytical discipline to monetary policymaking and helped establish the credibility that remains one of the Federal Reserve’s most important assets.”
But his tenure was also a prelude to the Great Recession of 2008 and his belief in a light regulatory touch for banks helped speed up consolidation in the financial services industry, which critics say may have helped bring about the breakdown.
He was first appointed Fed chair in August 1987 by President Ronald Reagan and that same year navigated the U.S. economy through a crisis when the stock market crashed in October. He then earned widespread praise for the Fed’s actions as the stock market boomed in the 1990s.
During the Great Recession, Greenspan admitted to lawmakers that he was mistaken in assuming that banks would self-regulate without stronger government oversight.
“Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholders’ equity, myself included, are in a state of shocked disbelief,” he said in 2008.
After leaving the Fed, he served as a private consultant, published multiple books and also shared his insights on the economy on TV news shows.
Most recently, in January 2026, Greenspan and 12 other former Fed chairs and top economists signed a statement criticizing President Donald Trump’s criminal investigation into then-Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, calling it “an unprecedented attempt to use prosecutorial attacks to undermine that independence.”
“This is how monetary policy is made in emerging markets with weak institutions, with highly negative consequences for inflation and the functioning of their economies more broadly,” the statement said. “It has no place in the United States whose greatest strength is the rule of law, which is at the foundation of our economic success.”
Greenspan was born in New York on March 6, 1926. His father, Herbert Greenspan, was a Wall Street stockbroker and analyst. Before he became an economist, Alan Greenspan was a professional jazz musician, playing saxophone and clarinet in the band Henry Jerome and His Orchestra.
After a brief stint at the prestigious Juilliard music conservatory in the early 1940s, Greenspan transferred to New York University to study economics. He said the change in his life’s course came as he realized he would not become one of the musical greats.
“I played next to Stan Getz,” Greenspan told “CBS Sunday Morning” in 2013 of his time playing with the saxophonist jazz legend. “I was 16, he was 15, and I played for years, side by side with him in a band and he pretty much determined that I was going to become an economist.”
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He graduated with a degree in economics in 1948 and got a master’s degree in the same subject in 1950. He eventually earned a Ph.D. in 1977.
His introduction to Washington came in the mid-1970s when he was appointed chair of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Gerald Ford; he served in that post from 1974 to 1977. He spent most of his working life prior to his Fed appointment as the head of his own economic consulting firm, Townsend-Greenspan & Co.
Greenspan, a Republican, was a close friend of the libertarian writer Ayn Rand and was heavily influenced by her ideas. In his 2007 memoir, “The Age of Turbulence,” he wrote:
Rand’s Collective became my first social circle outside the university and the economics profession. I engaged in the all-night debates and wrote spirited commentary for her newsletter with the fervor of a young acolyte drawn to a whole new set of ideas.
As befits a Rand acolyte, Greenspan believed in a free market economic policy and did not think banks should be heavily regulated.
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In taking the helm of the Fed in 1987, he replaced Paul Volcker. His tenure comprised the majority of what is known as the Great Moderation ― the period between the mid-1980s and 2007 when the economy experienced low volatility in the business cycle, low unemployment and relatively low inflation.
Economists disagree whether this period of generally unfettered economic expansion was the result of good monetary policy and structural changes in the economy, simple good luck, or a combination of the two.
Greenspan was widely hailed for allowing the 1990s economy to run hotter than most economists at the time thought was sustainable without inflation, allowing one of the longest economic expansions in the nation’s history.
Still, in 1996, Greenspan suggested that “irrational exuberance” in the stock market was inflating asset bubbles and creating excessive stock valuations, which could lead to prolonged economic contractions when the bubbles burst. That prediction came a few years before the dot-com bubble burst and was far ahead of the 2008 housing bubble, but it did turn out to be correct. The phrase “irrational exuberance” is still used on Wall Street.
While Greenspan’s public utterances were often dense and technical, heightening his reputation as a sage, he sometimes let a more relaxed side show through.
In 1998, he told reporters covering a congressional hearing that he thought Chicago Cubs slugger Sammy Sosa was premature in counting himself out of the home run race with Mark McGwire. Sosa went on to catch up to McGwire later that day, extending Greenspan’s reputation as a seer to include his beloved sport of baseball.
That same year, the Fed approved the merger of insurer Travelers Group with Wall Street giant Citibank to form Citigroup. The deal created the first modern one-stop banking, insurance and investments company and effectively served as a warning that if Congress was not going to modernize banking, regulators retained the power to do it themselves.
The prod worked. In 1999, Congress, after years of false starts, passed a banking system overhaul that repealed the Great Depression-era Glass-Steagall law, formally dropping prohibitions against such mergers.
In 2005, Greenspan was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President George W. Bush. At the ceremony, Bush said, “the era of Chairman Greenspan will always be known as one of phenomenal economic growth, high productivity, and unprecedented innovation and opportunity for all our citizens.”
Opinions of Greenspan’s tenure at the Fed became considerably more mixed in the wake of the Great Recession.
Some critics, like Stanford University economist John Taylor, argued that the Fed’s low interest rates made it too easy to borrow in the run-up to the crisis. The policy included the Fed slashing interest rates down to 1% in the years after the bursting of the dot-com bubble and the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
Others, like Princeton University economist Alan Blinder, who was vice chair of the Fed under Greenspan, have defended Greenspan’s monetary policy but said the central bank should have addressed loose regulation of the big banks in the walk-up to the Great Recession.
In early 2008, months before the failure of the global investment bank Bear Stearns and the worst of the financial crisis, Blinder told The Washington Post that during the previous decade, “lending standards were being horribly relaxed, and the Fed should have done something about that, not to mention about deceptive and in some cases fraudulent practices.”
In response to his critics, Greenspan wrote a long paper published by the Brookings Institution in 2010, asserting that the crisis was not the Fed’s fault.
Sebastian Mallaby, in his 2016 biography “The Man Who Knew: The Life and Times of Alan Greenspan,” painted a complex picture of Greenspan as more interested in the Fed’s traditional inflation fighting role than its responsibility to also keep the financial system stable.
“In short, Greenspan knew that financial instability mattered. But he focused instead on inflation for a simple and not entirely good reason. Controlling asset prices and leverage was hard; fighting inflation was easier.”