Alan Greenspan

He grew up in his Russian-born grandparents' apartment in Washington Heights after his parents divorced, and what he wanted was to play. He took clarinet and saxophone at George Washington High School alongside Stan Getz, studied clarinet at Juilliard from 1943 to 1944, and went on the road with the Woody Herman band, where one of the sidemen was Leonard Garment, later Richard Nixon's White House counsel. A draft board turned him down in 1944 for a spot on his lung. He was good enough to work and not good enough to matter, so he quit, took a bachelor's degree at NYU summa cum laude in 1948 and a master's in 1950, and started a doctorate at Columbia under Arthur Burns that he abandoned for the consulting business.

From 1955 he ran Townsend-Greenspan & Co. in New York, reading industrial data for corporate clients, and that reputation rather than an academic one carried him into government. He coordinated domestic policy for Nixon's 1968 nomination campaign and chaired Gerald Ford's Council of Economic Advisers from 1974 to 1977. Reagan put him on the Federal Reserve, and he took the chair on August 11, 1987, two months before the crash of October 19, when he announced the Fed stood ready as a source of liquidity — the intervention that got his name attached to a permanent market expectation. Clinton kept him and he backed the 1993 deficit program. He warned about irrational exuberance in 1996, organized the Mexican rescue, endorsed the 2001 tax cut, and left on January 31, 2006 after the second-longest tenure the job has had.

His first wife introduced him to Ayn Rand in the early 1950s. Rand called him the undertaker, for the dark suits and the flat delivery. Nathaniel Branden converted him off logical positivism, he read Atlas Shrugged in draft as one of the inner circle, and in 1966 he contributed an essay defending the gold standard to Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal. Rand stood beside him at his 1974 swearing-in. He then spent 18 years setting the price of money for a currency backed by nothing. His NYU dissertation was withdrawn from the university at his own request in 1987. When Barron's obtained a copy in 2008, it turned out to discuss soaring house prices and to anticipate a housing bubble bursting.

On October 23, 2008 he sat in front of Henry Waxman's committee and said he had found a flaw in the model he had used to understand how the world works. Waxman pressed him: your ideology was not right, it was not working. "Absolutely, precisely," Greenspan said. He died at home in Washington on June 22, 2026, of complications of Parkinson's disease, at 100. The obituaries divided exactly along the fault line the record leaves. The Federal Reserve credited him with a sustained era of price stability. The Wall Street Journal said the crisis had dimmed him. The BBC called him the architect of the modern American economy. Whether his low rates built the housing bubble is still argued.

Alan Greenspan's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Gold and Economic Freedom article
  Written for The Objectivist and reprinted in Rand's Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal 1966
• Townsend-Greenspan & Co. company
  The consulting firm he ran for 32 years, minus the Ford years 1955
• Papers on Economic Theory and Policy other
  The NYU doctoral thesis he had pulled from the library in 1987 1977
• The irrational exuberance speech speech
  Two words that briefly moved every stock market on earth 1996
• The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World book
  Published a year before the crisis arrived 2007
• Capitalism in America: A History book
  Written with Adrian Wooldridge 2018

• 1943 aged ~17 Enters Juilliard to study clarinet He had played saxophone in high school alongside Stan Getz.
• 1944 aged ~18 Rejected for military service over a spot on his lung
• 1952 aged ~26 His first wife introduces him to Ayn Rand The marriage was annulled inside a year. The friendship lasted until Rand died in 1982.
• September 4, 1974 aged 48 Sworn in as chairman of Ford's Council of Economic Advisers Rand stood beside him at the ceremony.
• August 11, 1987 aged 61 Takes the chair of the Federal Reserve
• October 19, 1987 aged 61 Black Monday, and the promise of liquidity that made his name
• February 23, 2004 aged 77 Suggests more homeowners should consider adjustable-rate mortgages The funds rate was 1 percent. Within two years he had taken it to 5.25.
• October 23, 2008 aged 82 Tells Congress he has found a flaw in his ideology
• June 22, 2026 aged 100 Dies at home in Washington at 100

• Ayn Rand 1905–1982
  Novelist and philosopher whose defense of individualism and capitalism deeply influenced American conservative and libertarian thought. disciple of
• Paul Volcker 1927–2019
  Broke 1970s inflation as Federal Reserve chairman through sustained high interest rates. succeeded
• Ben Bernanke b. 1953
  Led the Federal Reserve through the 2008 financial crisis and won the 2022 Nobel Prize in Economics. handed the crisis to
• Ronald Reagan 1911–2004
  40th president whose conservative domestic program and assertive Cold War strategy reshaped American politics. appointed by
• Paul Krugman b. 1953
  Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist known for his work on trade and geography. criticized by
• Milton Friedman 1912–2006
  Nobel Prize-winning economist whose free-market ideas profoundly influenced American economic policy. shared the free-market case