Alan Greenspan, who steered the Federal Reserve for nearly two decades, through some of the longest economic booms in U.S.history, has died.
Greenspan died Monday at his home in Washington.He was 100.Greenspan was the rare celebrity among central bankers, lionized for his economic stewardship in the 1990s.
At a time when it seemed every barbershop had a television tuned to the stock market channel, ordinary Americans hung on the Fed chairman's every word.His reputation was tarnished, however, by the global financial crisis which struck a decade later.
Greenspan liked to write speeches in the bathtub, but it was his listeners who were sometimes left feeling underwater by the unfamiliar dialect known as "Fedspeak." Greenspan later acknowledged that he would deliberately garble his syntax to avoid saying anything that might move financial markets.A notorious exception came in 1996, when Greenspan seemed to suggest that stock prices might be getting ahead of themselves.
"How do we know when irrational exuberance has unduly escalated asset prices," he asked during a speech at the American Enterprise Institute.The warning that exuberant investors might not be quite rational sent temporary shivers through global stock markets.But Greenspan's own stock continued to climb.
He was married to NBC news anchor Andrea Mitchell, who anounced his death in a statement, and the two made a somewhat unlikely power couple.Comedian Jay Leno once joked during a White House Correspondents Association dinner that Mitchell, not then-First Lady Hillary Clinton, was married to "the most powerful man in the world." Greenspan was a talented jazz musician who studied clarinet and saxophone at Juilliard.
But it was economics that made him a rock star and a symbol of the widely-shared prosperity at the end of the 20th century.A master of monetary policy, Greenspan led the central bank under four different presidents, beginning in 1987.Much of his tenure was marked by falling unemployment.
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