Former US Federal Reserve chair Alan Greenspan has died aged 100, his wife has said.
NBC News correspondent Andrea Mitchell said in a statement reported by her employer that her husband had died from complications of Parkinson’s Disease.
Mitchell’s statement said Greenspan 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”.
For nearly 20 years, Alan Greenspan was charged with safeguarding the US economy and keeping the dollar sound.
As chairman of the Federal Reserve from 1987-2006, a post described as the second most important after the presidency, he presided over the longest sustained period of US economic growth in a generation.
Described as the “God in the machine” of American finance, Greenspan declined all requests for interviews during his time at the Fed.
But the media and the money markets hung on his few public statements, and a sign in his office said simply, “the buck starts here”.
But critics argue that an over-reliance on easy credit fuelled the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s and caused the sub-prime mortgage crisis of 2008.
Alan Greenspan was born in New York City on 6 March 1926. His mother, who worked in a furniture store, brought him up single-handed.
Far from being a budding economist, the young Greenspan was a talented musician, who studied the clarinet at New York’s renowned Julliard School of Music.
He played in a band with Stan Getz, the legendary jazz saxophonist, before touring the country with the Henry Jerome Band. This peripatetic lifestyle gave him a valuable practical insight into the workings of US business.
And while his fellow musicians spent their evenings smoking marijuana, Alan Greenspan busied himself by swotting up on economics and doing the band’s accounts.
At the age of 19, he enrolled as an economics student at New York University, where he became an apostle of the free market, and eventually found employment as an economic consultant and, later, as a member of the board at JP Morgan.
In 1952, Greenspan met the right-wing novelist and social philosopher Ayn Rand, whose views were to have a profound influence on him.
She called him “the undertaker” because of his liking for dark, sombre suits.
But the young economist came to support her belief that society functions most efficiently when people actively pursue their own self-interests, to the exclusion of the interests of society as a whole.
In an article he wrote in 1966, he declared “the welfare state” as “nothing more than a mechanism by which governments confiscate the wealth of the productive members of a society”.
Having successfully predicted the Eisenhower recession, Greenspan advised Richard Nixon during his successful presidential election campaign in 1968.
He went on to become head of the Council of Economic Advisers.
Greenspan later wrote that he found the president to be “sadly paranoid, misanthropic and cynical”, but the economist’s success at curbing inflation impressed Nixon’s successors.
Gerald Ford asked Greenspan to continue at the Council of Economic Advisers and – in the early 1980s – Ronald Reagan chose him to lead an inquiry into the reform of the America’s state pension system.
In August 1987, Reagan promoted him to chairman of the US Federal Reserve, and – for the next two decades – he became one of the most powerful men in the world. (BBC News)