WASHINGTON (AP) — U.S. Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan has died at the age of 100.
He died on Monday from complications of Parkinson’s Disease, according to his wife, Andrea Mitchell.
“To me he was my husband, who shaped my life from our very first date in 1984,” Mitchell said. “He had ‘irrational exuberance’ for baseball, the Washington Commanders, tennis, golf, and music, especially jazz. He will be remembered for his brilliance and his kindness. Being his life partner was the joy of my life.”
In his 18½ 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.
Alan Greenspan (left), chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors, listens while President Gerald Ford speaks at Ford’s economic summit at the White House. (Photo by Owen Franken/Corbis via Getty Images)
Greenspan was so respected during his many years as head of the world’s most influential central bank that by the time he stepped down in 2006, he was widely celebrated as the “Oracle’’ and “Maestro.’’
Greenspan’s reputation suffered a serious setback however, when the American housing market collapsed, igniting a global financial crisis that nearly toppled the U.S. banking system and plunged the economy into the worst recession since the 1930s. Critics pinned much of the blame for the crisis on Greenspan’s easy-money policies and on what they believed was an overexuberant faith in lightly supervised financial markets.
Greenspan himself later acknowledged that “I made a mistake’’ in assuming the nation’s banks, whose stability undergirds the financial system and the entire economy, could essentially regulate themselves.
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