Legendary Fed Chair Alan Greenspan Dies At 100

• Legendary Federal Reserve chair Alan Greenspan has died at age 100.
• Greenspan served as Fed chair from 1987 until 2006, earning the nickname "The Maestro."
• He helped turn the Fed chair from a figure of relative obscurity to a major public figure.

Alan Greenspan, the legendary central banker who led the Federal Reserve for nearly two decades, has died at 100.

"Alan passed away at our home this morning at the age of 100 from complications of Parkinson's disease," Greenspan's wife, Andrea Mitchell, said in a statement given to NBC. Mitchell is the chief Washington correspondent and the chief foreign affairs correspondent for NBC News.

"He was a giant of a man who helped shape the US economy for decades under presidents of both parties, but was always honest in acknowledging his mistakes," she 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, golf and music, especially jazz," Mitchell added. "

Serving as Fed chairman from 1987 to 2006, Greenspan oversaw nearly two decades of relative economic strength, which earned him praise and eventually the moniker "The Maestro."

He helped to sustain one of the strongest economic growth periods of the 20th century through his deft adjustment of interest rates. But according to his critics, his moves also overprioritized the financial markets and sowed the seeds of the monumental collapse of the housing market in 2008.

Greenspan also helped elevate the public profile of the position — earning the "rock star" label from the media — and increased the transparency of the Fed. After leaving the job, Greenspan consulted for a number of financial firms and remained a public voice on the economy.

"The true measure of a career is to be able to be content, even proud, that you succeeded through your own endeavors without leaving a trail of casualties in your wake," Greenspan said in 2005.

From clarinet player to the White House

Greenspan was born in 1926 in the Washington Heights neighborhood of New York City to Herbert Greenspan, a stockbroker, and Rose Goldsmith.

Growing up, Greenspan learned to play various musical instruments, even attending the prestigious Juilliard School for two years as a clarinet player. Greenspan was rejected by a draft board in 1944 due to a spot on his lung X-ray, so he spent some of the World War II years playing clarinet for bandleader Henry Jerome's ensemble.

Following the war, Greenspan studied at New York University, where he earned an undergraduate degree in economics in 1950 and eventually a Ph.D. in 1977.

Interestingly, Greenspan's dissertation — which was pulled from public access by NYU in 1987 at the economist's request and became a source of speculation — focused in part on the possibility of a housing bubble, a prescient topic given the housing crisis roughly three decades later.

Beyond academic interests, Greenspan also worked in the private sector, first at The National Industrial Conference Board — a think tank now known as the Conference Board — and later at his own economic consulting firm, Townsend-Greenspan & Co., where he helped to advise major corporations on economic trends. Greenspan also served on the boards of a slew of companies, including JPMorgan, Alcoa, and Mobil.

In addition to growing his private business, Greenspan began dipping his toes into government work during this time. He served as an advisor to Richard Nixon's 1968 campaign and helped with sophisticated polling analysis.

While Greenspan did not take a formal administration job under Nixon, he did serve as an outside advisor and contributed to various panels of experts. In particular, Greenspan served on the commission that, in 1970, recommended ending the military draft and moving to an all-volunteer service.

Greenspan did eventually join Gerald Ford's White House from 1974 to 1977 as Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers. During Ronald Reagan's presidency, Greenspan also chaired the National Commission on Social Security Reform from 1981 to 1983 and served on Reagan's Economic Policy Advisory Board.

Outside of work, Greenspan married his first wife, Joan Mitchell, in 1952. The marriage was annulled less than a year later, though the pair remained friendly. Mitchell did introduce Greenspan to another important figure in the economist's life, the philosopher and author Ayn Rand. The economist was taken with Rand's ideas of rugged individualism and free-market capitalism. Greenspan wrote a letter to the New York Times in defense of Rand's book "Atlas Shrugged" in the late 1950s and published a handful of articles in Rand's magazine "The Objectivist."

Though Greenspan later appeared to distance himself from some aspects of Rand's objectivist philosophy, he was widely considered one of the most famous of her acolytes prior to becoming Fed Chairman.

'The Maestro' takes over

Greenspan, a lifelong Republican, privately advised Reagan during the run-up to the 1980 presidential election and throughout the first six and a half years of his presidency. This relationship with Reagan ultimately led the president to select the economist to succeed Paul Volcker as the Chairman of the Federal Reserve in 1987. Greenspan would then go on to become the second-longest-serving Chairman in history and was renominated by Presidents George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush.

As Chairman, Greenspan was generally credited with a deft handling of monetary policy. The US only entered recessions twice during his nearly 20-year run, after averaging four recessions in each of the previous two 20-year periods.

Greenspan also helped to modernize the Fed's approach to dealing with the public. For decades, the Fed did not make public statements about what its target interest rate was or how it viewed the economy. But under Greenspan, the Fed and its interest rate-setting body, the Federal Open Market Committee, began to publicly declare its monetary policy decisions and release the minutes of its meetings. Greenspan also elevated the public profile of the Chairman's job, leading media outlets to dub him a "rock star" economist.

At the same time that Greenspan helped bring more information about the Fed to the public, he also perfected an inscrutable, academic way of speaking dubbed "Fedspeak."

"Since I've become a central banker, I've learned to mumble with great incoherence," he once said. "If I seem unduly clear to you, you must have misunderstood what I said."

Despite using language that inspired Wall Street to create a cottage industry of professional Fed translators, Greenspan was occasionally able to introduce big, clear ideas about the economy. The most famous of these was his December 1996 speech musing on the possibility that the Fed could use monetary policy to counter what he saw as the stock market's "irrational exuberance." The comment was widely understood as Greenspan warning that stock prices may have been too high.

While the speech caused some heartburn at the time, it would be a little over three years before Greenspan's worries about high asset values would come to fruition with the dot-com crash.

A complicated legacy

Despite the relatively strong economy that Greenspan presided over during his chairmanship, the Maestro was not without critics.

Democrats accused the economist of being outwardly partisan, supporting George W. Bush's tax cut and Social Security privatization plans. Support for the plans drew criticism from liberal economists like Paul Krugman, who in 2005 said the then-Chairman was "just another partisan hack," and Democratic politicians like Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, who similarly in 2005 called Greenspan "one of the biggest political hacks we have in Washington."

Perhaps more controversial still was Greenspan's supposed role in creating the housing bubble in the early 2000s. Critics argued that Greenspan's decisions to keep the federal funds rate low following the dot-com crash (the effective Fed funds rate remained below 2% from December 2001 through November 2004), distaste for regulations, and apparent support for the complex mortgage products that contributed to the bubble's inflation all contributed to the worst recession since the Great Depression.

During a 2008 congressional testimony, Greenspan admitted that his distaste for regulation may have been problematic in the run-up to the housing crisis, but the economist vehemently denied that his low-interest-rate policies at the start of the decade contributed substantially to the bubble. He argued in an April 2008 op-ed that "the evidence of monetary policy adding to the bubble is statistically very fragile."

Stepping down and looking back

Following his tenure as Chairman, Greenspan returned to the private sector, founding the economics consultancy Greenspan Associates. Greenspan was hired to advise a slew of financial institutions, including Deutsche Bank and Pacific Investment Management Company, or PIMCO.

Greenspan also regularly commented on economic affairs and published a memoir, "Age of Turbulence," soon after leaving the Fed.

Greenspan is survived by his second wife, journalist Andrea Mitchell. The pair's first date, Greenspan said, was mostly spent discussing monopolies, and he invited Mitchell back to his apartment to read the essay he had written on the subject. They eventually married in 1997 in a ceremony officiated by former Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.