Alan Greenspan

Alan Greenspan, the economist who steered the Federal Reserve for more than 18 years and became the most influential central banker of his era, died on June 22, 2026, at his home in Washington, D.C. He was 100. His wife, NBC News correspondent Andrea Mitchell, said the cause was complications of Parkinson's disease.

In announcing his death, Mitchell called him "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." On a more personal note, she said he had "shaped my life from our very first date in 1984." The couple married in 1997 and were together for nearly three decades.

A musician before an economist

Born on March 6, 1926, in the Washington Heights neighborhood of Manhattan, Greenspan came to economics by way of music. He studied clarinet at the Juilliard School and then toured as a professional saxophone and clarinet player with the Henry Jerome swing band, where one of his bandmates was the future jazz great Stan Getz. Greenspan later traced his career change to that stretch on the bandstand: "I was 16, he was 15, and I played for years, side by side with him in a band and he pretty much determined that I was going to become an economist." Playing next to a prodigy, he liked to explain, convinced him his real talent lay elsewhere.

He enrolled at New York University, earning a bachelor's degree in economics summa cum laude in 1948 and a master's in 1950. He went on to doctoral study at Columbia University under Arthur F. Burns, himself a future Fed chairman, but left before finishing to concentrate on his consulting business. NYU awarded him a Ph.D. in economics in 1977.

Around 1952, through his brief first marriage, Greenspan was drawn into the inner circle of the novelist and free-market philosopher Ayn Rand. Her laissez-faire convictions shaped his economic worldview, and the two remained close until her death in 1982. In 1953 he co-founded the economic consulting firm Townsend-Greenspan & Co., becoming its principal owner after his partner William Townsend died in 1958.

Washington and the Maestro years

Greenspan's first major turn in government came as chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Gerald Ford from 1974 to 1977, a period in which inflation fell from about 11 percent to 6.5 percent. A decade later, in August 1987, President Ronald Reagan named him chairman of the Federal Reserve.

The test came almost immediately. Barely two months into the job, on October 19, 1987, the stock market crashed on Black Monday, the Dow falling nearly 23 percent in a single session. Greenspan answered with a single sentence, affirming that the Fed stood "ready to serve as a source of liquidity," then flooded the banking system with cash and guided interest rates lower. His handling of the crisis steadied markets and began building the reputation for calm command that earned him the nickname "the Maestro."

Over the years that followed, his every utterance moved markets, and investors came to count on the Fed to cushion downturns, a reliance economists still call the "Greenspan put." He presided over the long economic expansion of 1991 to 2001, and his Fed tenure of 18 years and 5 months stands as the second-longest in the institution's history, behind only William McChesney Martin. In a December 1996 speech he wondered aloud whether "irrational exuberance" had begun to inflate asset prices, a phrase that entered the financial lexicon even though the boom it described ran on for several more years.

By 2002, Queen Elizabeth II had granted him an honorary knighthood, and in 2005, near the end of his term, President George W. Bush awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He retired from the Fed in January 2006 and published a best-selling memoir, "The Age of Turbulence," in 2007.

Candor about a flawed model

Greenspan's standing dimmed after the 2008 financial crisis, which critics traced in part to the light-touch regulation he had long championed. Testifying before the House Oversight Committee in October 2008, he conceded that the meltdown had exposed a gap in his thinking. "Yes, I've found a flaw," he told lawmakers, adding that he had been "very distressed" to discover that the free-market model he had trusted for 40 years had not protected the financial system as he expected. The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission would later fault the era's deregulation for helping set the stage for the collapse.

He remained a public voice to the end. In January 2026, Greenspan joined former Fed chairs Ben Bernanke and Janet Yellen, along with four former Treasury secretaries, in signing a rare joint statement condemning a Justice Department criminal inquiry into the sitting Fed chair, Jerome Powell. The signers called it "an unprecedented attempt to use prosecutorial attacks to undermine" the central bank's independence.

Greenspan was not infallible, and he said so plainly, a candor that set him apart in an age short on it. He will be remembered as the Maestro who guided the American economy through nearly two decades of booms and shocks, and for the two words, "irrational exuberance," that outlived the era they described.

He is survived by his wife, Andrea Mitchell.