Alan Greenspan, the Federal Reserve chairman who spent 18½ years inflating asset bubbles for the investor class while laying the groundwork for the financial crisis that devastated working Americans, died Monday at his home in Washington. He was 100.
The cause was complications of Parkinson's disease, according to his wife, NBC News correspondent Andrea Mitchell. Greenspan served four presidents — Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Clinton, and George W. Bush — a bipartisan stamp of approval that tells you everything about whose interests both parties served.
The establishment press is eulogizing him gently. CBS News called his tenure an "enduring legacy" and quoted New York Fed president John Williams saying his dedication "continues to inspire generations of central bankers." The Daily Caller settled for "complex, but undeniable legacy." The Guardian and the New York Times acknowledged the 2008 fallout but framed it as a subject of "debate" and "re-evaluation."
Here's what isn't debatable: Greenspan's low-interest-rate regime and religious faith in self-regulating markets inflated the housing bubble, poisoned the financial system with toxic mortgage securities, and produced the deepest economic catastrophe since the Great Depression — all after he walked out the door in 2006, leaving ordinary Americans to eat the losses.
The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission said so directly: more than three decades of deregulation "championed by former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan and others" had "stripped away key safeguards, which could have helped avoid catastrophe," as reported by both Breitbart and The Guardian.
Greenspan himself admitted it. "Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholders' equity, myself especially, are in a state of shocked disbelief," he told Congress in October 2008. He later put it plainly: "I made a mistake."
But the mistake wasn't just a bad call. It was the entire architecture. Greenspan's free-market convictions were forged in Ayn Rand's circle, where capitalism wasn't merely efficient but "moral," as Breitbart noted. That ideology — that markets police themselves, that Wall Street's self-interest protects the system — became the operating software of the Fed. The result: Wall Street got the gains during the boom, and Main Street swallowed the losses when the bubble popped.
CBS News highlighted the so-called "Great Moderation" — the period of low inflation and steady growth that made Greenspan a celebrity. That moderation was always a privilege of the asset-owning class. For working Americans, the Greenspan era coincided with stagnant wages, offshoring of manufacturing jobs, and a housing market that morphed from the American dream into a speculative casino.
Even his famous 1996 warning about "irrational exuberance" was all talk. He identified the bubble. He did nothing to pop it. The dot-com crash came anyway, and then he doubled down with low rates that fed the housing bubble — the same pattern of cheap money and willful blindness.
In January, Greenspan joined former Fed chairs Ben Bernanke and Janet Yellen in condemning what they called an "unprecedented" attempt by the Trump administration to weaken the Fed's independence, according to The Guardian. The same man who couldn't bring himself to regulate banks was deeply concerned about protecting the central bank from democratic accountability.
The maestro's symphony played beautifully for Wall Street. Main Street is still living with the wreckage.
