Alan Greenspan, the most consequential central banker of the late 20th century, died on Monday at his Washington home aged 100. His wife, NBC News correspondent Andrea Mitchell, attributed the death to complications of Parkinson’s disease. The Federal Reserve, in a statement, said Greenspan’s legacy “endures at the Federal Reserve — in those he mentored directly, in the economists and public servants he inspired, and in the frameworks and practices he helped shape.” His passing removes the last towering figure of the pre-crisis monetary era and arrives just weeks after the Senate confirmed Kevin Warsh as the new Fed chair, a transition that has already prompted comparisons with the Greenspan years.

Greenspan chaired the Fed from August 1987 to January 2006, the second-longest tenure in the institution’s history. He steered the US economy through the 1987 Black Monday crash, the 1990s productivity boom, the Asian and Russian financial contagions, the dot-com bust and the aftermath of the 11 September 2001 attacks. His conviction that a technology-driven surge in productivity would contain inflation allowed him to resist rate hikes, helping to engineer the decade-long expansion that economists dubbed the “Great Moderation.” In financial centres from London to Tokyo, investors parsed his deliberately opaque “Fedspeak” for signals, and his 1996 warning of “irrational exuberance” became a market-moving catchphrase. Yet the same accommodative stance, coupled with an ideological faith in self-regulating markets — shaped in part by his early association with novelist Ayn Rand — later drew fierce criticism.

Viewed from Washington, the Greenspan era was one of near-mythical authority; Bob Woodward’s 2000 biography christened him “Maestro.” But the 2007–2009 global financial crisis shattered that reputation. Critics across Europe and Asia argued that the low interest rates he maintained after 2001 fuelled the US housing bubble, while his resistance to regulating over-the-counter derivatives allowed systemic risk to accumulate. In a 2008 congressional hearing, Greenspan conceded he had found a “flaw” in his worldview, admitting he was “shocked” that banks had not acted in their own long-term self-interest. The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission later concluded that more than 30 years of deregulation, championed by Greenspan, had stripped away key safeguards.

His death reopens a fault line in central banking. Under his successors, the Fed adopted explicit inflation targets, held regular press conferences and deployed balance-sheet tools Greenspan never confronted. Yet the new chair, Kevin Warsh, has signalled a desire to dial back forward guidance, a move some analysts in Frankfurt and New York interpret as a partial return to the Greenspan style of strategic ambiguity. The immediate milestone is the Fed’s next policy meeting, where Warsh’s approach to communication and the legacy of the Greenspan framework will face their first real test.