\n<\/p>\n
Alan Greenspan, the influential economist who \u200bsteered US \u2060monetary policy \u2060during \u200bhis \u200cfive \u200cterms as chair \u200cof the Federal Reserve \u200cunder four presidents, \u200bhas died aged 100.<\/p>\n
The central bank said its former chair \u201chelped establish the credibility that remains one of the Federal Reserve\u2019s most important assets\u201d in a statement on Monday that announced Greenspan\u2019s death.<\/p>\n
In a separate statement that she shared with NBC News, Andrea Mitchell \u2013 Greenspan\u2019s wife and a correspondent of the network \u2013 said he died from complications of Parkinson\u2019s disease. \u201cHe will be remembered for his brilliance and his kindness,\u201d Mitchell\u2019s statement to NBC said.<\/p>\n
Greenspan chaired the Federal Reserve from 1987 to 2006, serving under the presidencies of Ronald Reagan, George HW Bush, Bill Clinton and George W Bush.<\/p>\n
He was widely credited with presiding over a period of growth and prosperity in the US while helming the Fed under three Republicans and a Democrat, gaining bipartisan political support in the process.<\/p>\n
But the country\u2019s housing market collapsed shortly after he left office, ushering in a devastating financial crisis that plunged the national economy into the worst recession since the 1930s and the Great Depression \u2013 and prompting a re-evaluation of his legacy.<\/p>\n
\u201cMore than 30 years of deregulation and reliance on self-regulation by financial institutions, championed by former Federal Reserve [chair] Alan Greenspan and others \u2026 had stripped away key safeguards, which could have helped avoid catastrophe,\u201d concluded the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission that investigated the collapse.<\/p>\n
Greenspan later acknowledged having \u201cmade a mistake\u201d in believing US banks could effectively regulate themselves before the housing market\u2019s collapse, which dealt a blow to his reputation as an economic \u201coracle\u201d or \u201cmaestro\u201d.<\/p>\n
But he defended himself against critics who sought to pin much of the blame for the US\u2019s 2008 financial meltdown on him.<\/p>\n
In his 2013 book The Map and the Territory, Greenspan argued that traditional economic forecasting was no match for the irrational risk-taking that can feed catastrophic price bubbles. \u201cBubbles go up very slowly as euphoria builds,\u201d Greenspan told the Associated Press in a 2013 interview. \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
He earned bachelor\u2019s, master\u2019s and doctoral degrees in economics \u2013 all from New York University \u2013 before spending three decades running an economic consulting firm.<\/p>\n
Greenspan\u2019s tenure of 18 and a half years as Fed chair was just five months from the being the longest such stint at the bank. Only William McChesney Martin, who led the central bank from 1951 to 1970, served in the post for a longer period.<\/p>\n
After his retirement, Greenspan kept himself busy into his 90s, including by writing a memoir along with two other books \u2013 as well as commentating on economic news on television.<\/p>\n
In January, he joined fellow ex-Fed chairs Ben Bernanke and Janet Yellen in condemning what they called an \u201cunprecedented\u201d attempt by Donald Trump\u2019s presidential administration to weaken the independence of the US\u2019s central bank. They did so after the Department of Justice opened a controversial <\/strong>criminal investigation into Jerome Powell, who chaired the bank from 2018 to May, and has been a target of Trump\u2019s ire.<\/p>\n Greenspan and the other former Fed chairs cautioned that similar prosecutorial attacks in other countries had produced \u201chighly negative consequences\u201d for the cost of living \u2013 and maintained that there was \u201cno place\u201d for them in the US. (The investigation was later dropped.)<\/p>\n After announcing his death at their home on Monday, Mitchell praised Greenspan as \u201ca giant of a man who helped shape the US economy for decades under presidents of both parties, but was always honest in acknowledging his mistakes\u201d.<\/p>\n Mitchell\u2019s tribute to Greenspan also said that he \u201cshaped my life from our very first date in 1984\u201d.<\/p>\n Alluding to a phrase Greenspan once famously used to describe how overly optimistic investors could fuel economic bubbles, Mitchell added that her late husband \u201chad \u2018irrational exuberance\u2019 for baseball, the Washington Commanders [football team], tennis, golf and music, especially jazz.<\/p>\n \u201cBeing his life partner was the joy of my life.\u201d<\/p>\n The Associated Press and Reuters contributed reporting<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Alan Greenspan, the influential economist who \u200bsteered US \u2060monetary policy \u2060during \u200bhis \u200cfive \u200cterms as chair \u200cof the Federal Reserve \u200cunder four presidents, \u200bhas died aged 100. The central bank said its former chair \u201chelped establish the credibility that remains one of the Federal Reserve\u2019s most important assets\u201d in a statement on Monday that announced<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":50582,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[49],"tags":[5289,9731,2527,319,24831,7310,517],"class_list":{"0":"post-50581","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-business","8":"tag-aged","9":"tag-alan","10":"tag-dies","11":"tag-federal","12":"tag-greenspan","13":"tag-longtime","14":"tag-reserve"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50581","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=50581"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50581\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/50582"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=50581"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=50581"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=50581"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}