Alan Greenspan

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Alan Greenspan was given the Presidential Medal of Freedom by George W. Bush in 2005.

Shealah Craighead/The White House

Alan Greenspanwas an American economist and chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System from 1987–2006, spanning the administrations of four U.S. presidents.

At age 5, Greenspan demonstrated his proficiency in mathematics by reciting baseball batting averages and performing large calculations in his head. As a youth he studied music at the Juilliard School and played jazz saxophone and clarinet in the Henry Jerome band.

He went on to study economics at New York University (B.A., 1948; M.A., 1950) and began work on a doctorate at Columbia University under economist and future Fed chairman Arthur F. Burns.

He met the polemical novelist Ayn Rand in 1952 and became a member of her inner circle, embracing the principles of objectivism, including radical self-interest and laissez-faire capitalism.

Greenspan left Columbia in 1953 and formed Townsend-Greenspan & Co., Inc., an economic consulting firm in New York. After William Townsend’s death in 1958, Greenspan became president and chief owner. Following Rand’s urging, he served in 1967 as an adviser for Richard Nixon’s 1968 presidential election campaign. Greenspan helped with Nixon’s transition to the office but refused a permanent appointment in the Nixon administration, advising the president only informally and serving on presidential task forces and commissions.

As chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers (1974–77) during Gerald Ford’s presidency, Greenspan supported anti-inflation policies as inflation fell to 6.5% from 11%. In 1977, Greenspan returned to his firm in New York. He also became an adjunct professor at New York University and received a Ph.D. in economics based on his professional writings.

During the economic expansion of the 1990s, Greenspan became one of the most influential and recognizable figures in global finance. Nicknamed the “Maestro,” he was widely credited with helping guide the U.S. economy through periods of growth and market volatility.

Appointed by U.S. President Ronald Reagan to fill Paul A. Volcker’s term as chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, Greenspan took office on August 11, 1987. During the years of his chairmanship, Greenspan became known for his decisive use of monetary policy in steering the economy between the hazards of inflation and recession. When the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell a record 508 points on October 19, 1987—an event known as Black Monday—Greenspan acted quickly to reassure markets and maintain liquidity in the financial system.

When the Asian financial crisis triggered economic downturns in the region beginning in 1997, he lowered U.S. interest rates to cushion the economy. As the Asian economies recovered and the U.S. economy continued its solid expansion, he initiated a series of interest rate hikes in June 1999.

Greenspan warned that rapid gains in stock prices might not be sustainable. In a 1996 speech that rattled global markets, he famously asked, “How do we know when irrational exuberance has unduly escalated asset values?” The phrase became closely associated with the speculative excesses of the dot-com era.

Despite moments of volatility—including a market crash early in his tenure and financial shocks from abroad—Greenspan’s steady leadership helped sustain an extended period of growth. He was thus given a share of the credit for the longest official economic expansion in U.S. history (March 1991–March 2001).

Greenspan’s tenure as chairman of the Federal Reserve Board ended in January 2006. He was succeeded by Ben Bernanke.

Although Greenspan left office with exceptionally high approval ratings, assessments of his tenure changed significantly after the financial crisis of 2007–08. Critics argued that the Fed under Greenspan had kept interest rates too low for too long and had failed to adequately regulate increasingly complex financial markets, while supporters maintained that broader structural forces were primarily responsible for the crisis.

In 2011, the bipartisan Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission concluded that Greenspan’s support for deregulation and his failure to more aggressively address risks associated with subprime mortgage lending and mortgage-backed securities during the housing bubble of the early 2000s contributed to the global financial crisis of 2007–08. The crisis led to major government responses, including passage of the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008.

In The Map and the Territory: Risk, Human Nature, and the Future of Forecasting (2013), Greenspan advanced guidelines for market prognostication in light of the lessons learned from the financial crisis. Although the book mostly constituted a reassertion and recontextualization of Greenspan’s long-held principles, it notably allowed for the greater impact of John Maynard Keynes’s “animal spirits”—essentially human emotion—on market behavior.

Greenspan wrote several other books, including Capitalism in America: A History (2018; written with Adrian Wooldridge). His memoir, The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World, was published in 2007.

Greenspan died from complications of Parkinson disease on June 22, 2026, at his home in Washington, D.C. He was 100 years old.