Alan Greenspan, hailed as the greatest Federal Reserve chairman when he retired in 2006 but derided for a severe financial crisis that followed barely two years later, died on Monday aged 100, NBC News reported.
Greenspan, who exerted a powerful influence on the US economy during his tenure at the helm of the Fed from August 1987 to January 2006, died at his home from complications of Parkinson’s disease, NBC reported, citing his wife Andrea Mitchell, who is the outlet’s chief Washington correspondent.
Greenspan oversaw the second-longest economic expansion in US history, an uninterrupted decade of growth from March 1991 to March 2001.
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His decision to let the economy run – despite pressure to raise interest rates against an inflation threat that never materialised – helped foster years of US prosperity and earned him rock star status as an economic “maestro”.
The era was marked by his prescient judgment that a productivity surge in the mid-1990s would keep inflation contained.
His intuition in that moment is still a touchstone for policymakers, and has been referred to by former Fed chair Jerome Powell as an example of how judgment can sometimes outperform technical models of the economy.
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