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Posted on 03/06/2026 12:13:26 PM PST by Borges
If you remember Alan Greenspan becoming chair of the Federal Reserve System, you are almost certainly over 50. He was nominated in June 1987, the same month in which President Ronald Reagan, visiting West Berlin, urged Mikhail Gorbachev to “tear down this wall.” It is language from another era: West Berlin, the Soviet Union, glasnost and perestroika.
Alan Greenspan was born in Washington Heights in New York City in 1926, just over 10 miles from Donald Trump’s birthplace of Jamaica Hospital in Queens. There ends any significant similarity. Greenspan’s parents, Herbert and Rose, were Jews of Eastern European descent. He attended George Washington High School; improbably, his schoolmates included Henry Kissinger and computer scientist John Kemeny, and he played clarinet in a band with Stan Getz.
Greenspan’s career was a mixture of the academic and the practical. He graduated BA and MA in economics at New York University, then began doctoral research at Columbia under Arthur Burns.
But in 1953 he had joined economic consultancy Townsend-Skinner to replace the son-in-law of Bill Townsend’s late co-founder. Greenspan’s methodical, data-driven forecasting became a foundation of what he called their “ability to translate economic analysis into a form business leaders could apply in making decisions.”
Townsend-Greenspan, as it had now become, prospered, and the partnership attracted clients including U.S. Steel, Armco and Inland Steel. Sure of his analysis, Greenspan predicted the 1958 Eisenhower Recession when few others did, enormously boosting his credibility.
Greenspan was increasingly prominent in free-market economics. He forged a long-time friendship with Milton Friedman and was influenced by Ayn Rand’s notion of Objectivism. Inevitably he attracted interest from across the always-diffuse boundary between economics and politics. He was courted by Richard Nixon, but it was not until a few weeks after Nixon’s resignation that he became chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers for President Gerald Ford.
Inflation was high — 12.3 percent in 1974 — and Greenspan advised that bringing it down should be Ford’s greatest priority, by reducing public expenditure and bringing down the deficit. It had halved by the time he left office in 1977.
Greenspan returned to consultancy, but then came the call to be 13th chair of the Federal Reserve. He was 61, renowned for “his uncanny skill with numbers and statistics,” hard-working and faintly austere. His colleague Kathryn Eickhoff said of his ability to predict economic trends:
“He does it not by intuition or instinct — that would be anathema to Alan — but by methodical, logical analysis of the data.”
That had been his approach for 30 years. His tenure at the Fed began with the stock market crash of October 1987, and his response would become so characteristic it was dubbed the “Greenspan put.” It involved the Fed purchasing large volumes of Treasury bonds which generated profits for Wall Street banks which could be invested elsewhere; facilitating cheap borrowing by cutting the federal funds rate; and issuing repurchase agreements as indirect quantitative easing.
The “Greenspan put” ameliorated the 1987 crash and was used again during the savings and loan crisis, the first Gulf War and the Mexican peso crisis of 1994. It was not without drawbacks, and many saw the device as responsible for the dot-com bubble which burst in 2000. It was also blamed for the expectation of huge profits at little risk that fueled the eventual global financial crisis of 2007-08.
Yet Greenspan was doing something right. He was renominated by George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, serving 18 and a half years as chair of the Fed (1987 to 2006), only behind the record holder, William McChesney Martin (1951 to 1970). Throughout his tenure, GDP contracted only once, in 1991. The era was known as “the Great Moderation,” featuring stability, relatively low inflation (only exceeding 5 percent once) and rising prosperity.
It is hard in today’s climate to imagine a public official commanding such broad respect. Greenspan cultivated this image: when his nomination for a fourth term was disclosed early in 2000, The New York Times explained that he had “become an institution in his own right, one whose support runs so broadly and deeply in Washington and on Wall Street that the White House was under increasing pressure to make its decision known.”
His aura of Olympian detachment was strengthened by the fact that he gave not a single broadcast interview during his tenure at the Fed, his biographer describing him as “the quiet God in the machine.”
Greenspan has his critics. Devout libertarians accused him of abandoning his principles as chair of the Fed, but he argued he had been a pragmatist. For many, especially on the left, his laissez-faire beliefs were central to the 2007-08 crisis, for which he cannot be forgiven. He was initially defensive of his hostility to regulating economics, writing waspishly in The Financial Times in 2008:
“We have tried regulation ranging from heavy to central planning. None meaningfully worked. Do we wish to retest the evidence?”
Later that year, however, he admitted that his faith in the self-regulatory tendency of the free market had been shaken badly.
It seems too neat, too convenient to place the blame for the global financial crisis wholly on Greenspan. He warned of a coming recession, and his observation that “we cannot hope to anticipate the specifics of future crises with any degree of confidence” was surely correct. And if “market flexibility and open competition” are not “our most reliable and effective safeguards against cumulative economic failure,” no one has devised an alternative with universal acceptance.
Alan Greenspan was not a “quiet God”; he was and remains mortal. Now, President Trump has called the Fed “crazy” and “loco,” accused the current chair, Jereme Powell, of enjoying raising interest rates, nicknamed him “Mr. Too Late,” spent months trying to fire him and then had the FBI place him under investigation. Politics has come a long way.
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The guy in there now is the worst ever.
Housing is the worst in my lifetime of 73 years.
We own a real-estate company. Interest rates, way to high.
It doesn’t say but today (March 6) is his birthday. His current wife, Andrea Mitchell, is 20 years younger.
A bio and no mention of his mate, Skeletor? Her Wiki bio mentioned him.
Yeah, I was in various RE endeavors from ‘79 to ‘2009, and still dabble with a few hangovers. Powell is terrible at handling the press and intensely focused on “looking at the data” which is like driving on the highway while watching your hood ornament and rear-view mirror. He lacks the fortitude to act on forecasts so he’s always behind the curve.
(IMHO, obviously)
He secretly was tying the dollar to Gold, which is why Gold got as low as 300$/Oz. As an Ayn Rand insider Gold was the standard to base money on.
I remember when it broke $400 upon the return of Khomeini to Iran. At the time I remember reading an ounce of gold had always been valued at about the same as agood suit of mens clothes.
Strange she shot past him like that, ‘cuz she looks 120 now, or she did last I saw her 5 years ago.
I thought he was 100 when he ran the Fed.
Irrational Exuberance.
Those words from this idiot caused a major stock market crash.
Being a fan of Von Mises, I am not thrilled by any kind of central banking priming the pumps, which Greenspan did, which in turn stoked equity markets to forming a bubble.
I love how they showed their true colors at the end by inserting that crap about Trump. They just couldn’t help it. No mention of the fact that liberals have gone off the deep end & the world has changed immeasurably since 2006.
Rush called her “Angrier Mitchell”
In his 1966 essay "Gold and Economic Freedom", published in Ayn Rand’s Objectivist newsletter, Greenspan asserted that the gold standard is inseparable from economic freedom, acting as a safeguard against government overreach. He wrote that in the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation, and that a free banking system under gold acts as a protector of economic stability and balanced growth.
From the source article;"Inflation was high — 12.3 percent in 1974 — and Greenspan advised that bringing it down should be Ford’s greatest priority, by reducing public expenditure and bringing down the deficit. It had halved by the time he left office in 1977." Another misleading statement about inflation where the only replacement to the value stolen would be deflation, but nobody can say that, much less do that.
Living proof that only the good die young.
Well I don’t know. You and I are still here.
😆
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