Alan Greenspan, who led the U.S. Federal Reserve from August 1987 to January 2006, died on Monday at his home in Washington at the age of 100. His wife, NBC News correspondent Andrea Mitchell, attributed the death to complications of Parkinson’s disease. The Federal Reserve issued a statement acknowledging his passing, noting that his contributions “left a lasting mark on this institution, on the broader field of economics, and on the country.”

Greenspan’s 18-year tenure spanned the second-longest economic expansion in U.S. history, a decade of uninterrupted growth from March 1991 to March 2001. During this period, the S&P 500 nearly quadrupled, unemployment fell to 3.8% in April 2000, and inflation remained contained—a phase economists termed the “Great Moderation.” His decision to hold interest rates steady in the mid-1990s, based on a judgment that a technology-driven productivity surge would suppress inflation, was later cited by former Fed Chair Jerome Powell as an example of how judgment can sometimes outperform technical models. Greenspan also guided the central bank through the 1987 stock market crash, the 1997-1998 Asian and Russian financial crises, the dot-com bubble collapse, and the economic aftermath of the September 11 attacks.

His legacy, however, became sharply contested after the 2007-2009 global financial crisis. Critics, including the U.S. Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, argued that Greenspan’s advocacy for light-touch financial regulation and the prolonged low interest rates after 2001 contributed to the housing bubble and subsequent crash. In 2008 congressional testimony, Greenspan acknowledged a “flaw” in his worldview, stating he had been “shocked” that banks’ self-interest did not prevent reckless risk-taking. Former senior Fed official Stephen Oliner told Reuters that the “deification that came just before the financial crisis was never really deserved, and I think the lambasting that he took after he left was never fully deserved either.”

Greenspan’s death comes as the Fed operates under a new chair, Kevin Warsh, who was confirmed by the Senate in May 2026. Warsh has signaled an intention to reduce the central bank’s forward guidance, a partial return to the more opaque communication style associated with Greenspan’s era. The institution Greenspan helped shape now deploys tools—such as large-scale asset purchases and explicit inflation targets—that were not part of his policy toolkit.