Alan Greenspan, former US Fed Reserve chair, dies aged 100

Alan Greenspan, hailed as the greatest Federal Reserve chairman when he retired in 2006 but derided for a severe financial crisis that followed barely two years later, died on Monday aged ⁠100, NBC News reported.

Greenspan, who exerted a powerful influence on the US economy ⁠during his tenure at the helm of the Fed from August 1987 to January 2006, died at his home ⁠from complications of Parkinson’s disease, NBC reported, citing his wife Andrea Mitchell, who is the outlet’s chief Washington correspondent.

Greenspan oversaw the second-longest economic expansion in US history, an uninterrupted decade of growth from March 1991 to March 2001.

His decision to let the economy run – despite pressure to raise interest rates against an inflation threat that never materialised – helped foster years of US prosperity and earned him rock star status as an economic “maestro”.

The era was marked by his prescient judgment that a productivity surge in the mid-1990s would keep inflation contained.

His intuition in that moment is still a touchstone for policymakers, and has been referred to by former Fed chair Jerome Powell as an example of how judgment can sometimes outperform technical models of the economy.