Alan Greenspan, the Jewish American economist who led the U.S. Federal Reserve for 19 years, died on Monday at his home at the age of 100. His wife, NBC correspondent Andrea Mitchell, said the cause was complications from Parkinson's disease.
Greenspan served as Fed chairman under four presidents, first appointed by Ronald Reagan in 1987 and leaving office in 2006 under George W. Bush. His tenure was the second longest in the central bank's history. He earned widespread praise for steering the U.S. economy through periods of growth and crisis.
Just two months after taking office, he faced the 1987 Black Monday crash, when the Dow Jones fell 22%. His rapid move to inject liquidity into markets is credited with helping prevent a wider economic collapse. Under his leadership, the U.S. saw prolonged growth, unemployment below 4%, and a shift from federal deficit to budget surplus.
After he retired, Greenspan drew sharp criticism. Economists argued that cutting interest rates to 1% after the dot-com bubble burst and the September 11 attacks helped inflate the housing bubble. In 2008, after the housing market collapsed and the global financial crisis hit, he told Congress he was in a "state of shock" at the scale of the damage, though he later said low rates were not the direct cause. Known for his deliberately opaque language to avoid unsettling markets, he coined the term "irrational exuberance" in 1996 to describe surging stock prices. He also advised Presidents Nixon and Ford, ran a private consulting firm, received the Presidential Medal of Freedom and a British knighthood, and later wrote books on U.S. economic history.
