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.
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.
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.
