Alan Greenspan Dies: Longtime Federal Reserve Chairman Was 100

Alan Greenspan, who led the Federal Reserve under four presidents, steering the economy through unprecedented growth but also unnerving crisis, has died. He was 100.

Greenspan’s wife, NBC News chief Washington correspondent and chief foreign affairs correspondent, said in a statement that he died at their home on Monday morning from complications of Parkinson’s disease.

“He was a giant of a man who helped shape the U.S. economy for decades under presidents of both parties, but was always honest in acknowledging his mistakes,” Mitchell said. “To me he was my husband, who shaped my life from our very first date in 1984. He had ‘irrational exuberance’ for baseball, the Washington Commanders, tennis, gold and music, especially jazz. He will be remembered for his brillaince and his kindness. Being his life partner was the joy of my life.”

Greenspan served as Federal Reserve chairman from 1987 to 2006. The stock market crashed just a few months into his tenure, and it was followed several years later by a recession that sank the reelection prospects of George H.W. Bush. But Greenspan’s tenure included the technology boom of the 1990s, followed by the dot com bust in 2000 and the shock of the attacks on 9/11 the next year.

The Federal Reserve’s steadfast period of low interest rates in the 2000s was criticized as contributing to a housing bubble in the 2000s, followed by the mortgage crisis of 2007 and the Great Recession the following year.

A congressional report in 2011 cited a number of factors as contributing to the collapse, including the Federal Reserve’s “pivotal failure to stem the flow of toxic mortgages, which it could have done by setting prudent mortgage-lending standards.” They also pointed to the failure of federal regulators to act and lack of regulation around derivatives, among other causes.

Greenspan told Congress in 2008, “The consequent surge in global demand for U.S. subprime securities by banks, hedge and pension funds, supported by unrealistically positive rating designations by credit agencies, was, in my judgment, the core of the problem.”

He used the phrase “irrational exuberance” in a 1996 speech, a warning that stocks had become inflated, but the words have since been applied elsewhere whenever there are fears of a bubble in sectors of the economy.