Former US Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan dies at 100

(22 Jun 2026) RESTRICTION SUMMARY: ASSOCIATED PRESS ARCHIVE: Washington DC - 7 October 1998 ++4:3++ 1. Wide of then US Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan speaking 2. Mid of audience 3. SOUNDBITE: (English) Alan Greenspan, then US Federal Reserve Chairman: "The situation in the American economy has become very fluid for all the reasons I've been trying to outline. To date, to repeat, the economy has remained in reasonable shape with good growth and low, if not declining inflation, as a crucial element with respect to the existing state of affairs. But we are clearly facing a set of forces that should be dampening demand going forward to an unknown extent." ASSOCIATED PRESS ARCHIVE: Washington DC - 31 January 2006 ++4:3++ 4. Wide of Fed Open Market Committee meeting 5. Pull out from Greenspan seated at table 6. Pan of meeting 7. Greenspan speaking with other Fed governors 8. Pull out to wide shot of meeting ASSOCIATED PRESS ARCHIVE: Washington DC - 24 October 2005 ++4:3++ 9. US President George W. Bush walking to podium with Greenspan and then Fed Chairman-nominee Ben Bernanke 10. Pan from Bernanke to Greenspan STORYLINE: U.S. Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan has died at the age of 100. He died on Monday from complications of Parkinson’s Disease, said his wife of 29 years, NBC News correspondent Andrea Mitchell. In his 18 and a-half years at the helm of the Fed, Greenspan presided over a sustained era of American growth and prosperity, yet one that ended with devastating consequences in 2008, two years after he had left the central bank. Greenspan was so respected during his many years as head of the world’s most influential central bank that by the time he stepped down in 2006, he was widely celebrated as the “Oracle’’ and “Maestro.’’ Greenspan’s reputation suffered a serious setback however, when the American housing market collapsed, igniting a global financial crisis that nearly toppled the U.S. banking system and plunged the economy into the worst recession since the 1930s. Critics pinned much of the blame for the crisis on Greenspan’s easy-money policies and on what they believed was an overexuberant faith in lightly supervised financial markets. Greenspan himself later acknowledged that “I made a mistake’’ in assuming the nation’s banks, whose stability undergirds the financial system and the entire economy, could essentially regulate themselves. He presided over a breath-taking surge in stock prices and a 10-year economic boom that began in March 1991. He was widely celebrated as the “Maestro’’ and the “Oracle,” a virtuoso who nurtured America’s economic well-being and whose nearly every utterance was parsed for clues as to where interest rates, the economy and the financial markets might be headed. Greenspan’s intentions were so intensely theorized that it gave birth to new Fed folklore: The “Briefcase Indicator.” A stuffed briefcase carried into Fed meetings implied changes may be afoot because Greenspan carried with him charts and research to make his point. Greenspan’s reputation suffered almost as soon as he left the Fed in 2006, however. American housing prices began to slide, then accelerated into a dizzying plunge that inflicted huge losses for banks, pension funds and other investors that had bet heavily on real estate. As housing values plummeted, millions of Americans, many of them stuck with outsize mortgage debt, lost homes to foreclosure. Eventually, history would vindicate Born, not the Maestro. Find out more about AP Archive: http://www.aparchive.com/HowWeWork Twitter:   / ap_archive   Facebook:   / aparchives   ​​ Instagram:   / apnews   You can license this story through AP Archive: http://www.aparchive.com/metadata/you...