Former US Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan has died at the age of 100 | Articles about Obituaries

Former chairman of the Federal Reserve in the United States Alan Greenspan has died at the age of 100 due to complications from Parkinson’s disease.

“For me, he was my husband, who changed my life from our first day in 1984,” his wife of 29 years, NBC News reporter Andrea Mitchell, said Monday.

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“He had a ‘mindless joy’ in baseball, the Washington Commanders, tennis, golf, and music, especially jazz. He will be remembered for his wit and kindness.

During his more than 18 years at the helm of the Fed, Greenspan presided over a steady period of American growth and prosperity, but one that ended with disastrous results in 2008, two years after he left the central bank.

First appointed by US President Ronald Reagan in 1987, Greenspan was immediately tested after the worst one-day stock market crash in US history, when the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell more than 22 percent, which happened just two months into his administration.

Greenspan received a lot of credit for helping to restore order and stability. He assured Wall Street that the Fed would provide as much money to the financial system as needed to restore stability. Stocks rebounded, and the US economy recovered from the stock market crash.

Greenspan was so revered for years as the head of the world’s most famous bank that by 2006, he would preside over the 10-year inflation and economic expansion that began in March 1991 after the Great Depression.

He also guided the economy through the Asian and Russian financial crises of 1997-1998, the collapse of the dot-com stocks bubble in 2000, and the financial crisis that occurred on September 11, 2001.

“Under his leadership, the Federal Reserve achieved a period of stable rate stability that supported economic growth and helped strengthen public confidence in the institution,” the US Fed said in a statement on Monday.

Greenspan, however, faced a public crisis shortly after his retirement in 2006, when the US housing market collapsed, triggering the worst recession since the 1930s. Critics have pointed to his policies that led to inflation and laid the foundation for the 2007-2009 financial crisis.

“I think the image that came out right before the financial crisis was not right, and I think what he did after he left was also not right,” Stephen Oliner, the Fed’s former chief, told Reuters.

Greenspan himself later admitted that “I was wrong” to think that the banks of this country, whose stability drives the financial system and the entire economy, can regulate themselves.

Whatever Greenspan had to do at this time, his successors pushed the Fed in a new direction, and released tools to solve the economic problems that Greenspan had never faced, such as zero interest rates, and changed from anonymous communications to frequent communications, inflation targets, and frequent press conferences.

After leaving his job, Greenspan continued to make headlines. In his 2007 memoir, The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World, he spoke about the US-Iraq war.

“I regret that it is a political distraction to admit what everyone knows: the Iraq war is primarily about oil,” Greenspan’s book said.

Music came first

Born in New York City on March 6, 1926, Greenspan was the only child of Rose and Herbert Greenspan. His parents divorced when he was young, and he grew up in a small house in the Washington Heights section of New York with his mother and grandmother.

Greenspan’s first love was music, and he spent two years at the Juilliard School in New York studying the clarinet. He briefly toured with a swing band as a saxophone player before studying economics at New York University.

As a young man, Greenspan was a friend and colleague of novelist Ayn Rand, who advocated the growth of free markets and the pursuit of profit in books such as Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead.