The eulogists will tell you that Alan Greenspan was the Maestro, the Oracle, the man who steered the American economy through the long, golden afternoon of the Pax Americana. They will drone on about the Great Moderation and the taming of inflation. But let’s be honest: the man also gave us the intellectual scaffolding for the casino capitalism that made the 2008 crash inevitable. He worshipped at the altar of deregulation, convinced that markets were self-correcting oracles. He was wrong. And now he is dead at 100, leaving behind the wreckage of a model that the world still cannot bear to abandon.
Greenspan was a creature of another age, the age of the fin de siècle empire where the money managers were the new high priests. He understood something that the modern commentariat refuses to grasp: that an economy is not a machine, but a system of moral choices. His choices? To let the monied classes run wild, to slash the social contract, to treat the stock market as the true measure of national health. He institutionalised the cult of the shareholder, a cult that now hollows out our cities and starves our public services.
The man himself was a paradox: a disciple of Ayn Rand, the high priestess of selfishness, who spent decades in the very state laboratories of central planning he professed to despise. He was the ultimate technocrat, a man who believed that data and models could replace wisdom and judgment. And in the end, data failed him. He admitted to a “flaw” in his model when the housing bubble burst. The flaw, of course, was that he never understood the capacity for human folly, for greed, for the sheer irrational exuberance of a civilisation in decline.
His death marks the end of an era, but what an era: the era of the cult of the dollar, the era when we confused the health of the financial sector with the health of the republic. Now we are left with the ghosts of his policies: a generation of precariously employed workers, a hollowed-out manufacturing base, and a Federal Reserve that still speaks his language even as it stumbles through crises Greenspan never imagined.
It would be rude to speak only ill of the dead. Greenspan was a man of formidable intellect, and his early battles against inflation were a necessary corrective to the lassitude of the 1970s. But he confused a temporary solution with a permanent philosophy. He came to believe that the market was a moral force, that greed was good, that the invisible hand was a kind of divine providence. He was wrong. The hand was only ever visible in the form of bailouts and bank rescues, the nationalisation of private debts.
So let us mark the passing of Alan Greenspan not with the usual pieties, but with a cold, hard look at the legacy he leaves. An empire in decline. A population that no longer trusts its institutions. An economy that serves the few and extracts from the many. He was the chief architect of our gilded cage. He has gone to the final accounting. Let his works judge him.
