Alan Greenspan, economic oracle of the '90s, dies at 100
The man who basically controlled the global economy for two decades with nothing but a briefcase and some incredibly confusing sentences has passed away.
If you lived through the 1990s, Alan Greenspan was basically the wizard behind the curtain. He ran the Federal Reserve under four different presidents, and his vibe was so powerful that Wall Street analysts used to study the thickness of his briefcase to guess if he was going to raise interest rates.
He was the king of "Fed Speak"—a dialect of English specifically designed to sound like he was saying everything while actually saying absolutely nothing. He once famously told Congress that if he seemed unusually clear, they must have misunderstood him.
For a long time, he was treated like an economic god who could do no wrong. But then 2008 happened. It turns out that letting banks do whatever they wanted wasn't the flawless strategy everyone thought it was. He later admitted he found a "flaw" in his ideology, which is a very polite way of saying his deregulation party helped trigger the biggest financial meltdown since the Great Depression.
Living to a century is an impressive run, even if the tab for his biggest mistake is still being paid by everyone else.
Source: The New York Times
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