Alan Greenspan, the former Federal Reserve chairman who shaped the post-war American economy and whose policies echoed down the decades in boardrooms and kitchen tables across the world, has died at the age of 100. The UK Treasury tonight led tributes, calling him “one of the most influential economic figures of the 20th century”.
For a reporter like me, who spends her days tracking the price of a loaf and the mood on the picket line, Greenspan’s legacy is a complicated one. He was the Maestro, the man who steered the US economy through boom and crisis, but his faith in deregulation and financial wizardry left scars that we still feel in the cost of living today.
Greenspan was appointed Fed chair in 1987 by Ronald Reagan, a time when the memory of 1970s inflation was raw. His early years were defined by a brutal response to economic overheating. He raised interest rates to levels that caused recessions, but he broke the back of inflation. For savers and workers in secure jobs, this brought stability. But it came at a cost: the industrial heartlands of America and Britain saw factories close and union power dim. The “real economy” of manufacturing and manual labour was being remade.
Then came the 1990s. Inflation tamed, Greenspan oversaw a long expansion. He became a folk hero, but his philosophy of “light-touch” regulation allowed finance to balloon. The repeal of Glass-Steagall, which he supported, tore down the wall between banking and speculation. In Britain, Gordon Brown’s Treasury copied the playbook. The result? Cheap credit, rising house prices, and a boom for the City of London. But for families in Yorkshire or the Midlands, wages stagnated. The link between productivity and pay was broken.
By the early 2000s, Greenspan cut interest rates to near zero after the dot-com crash, fuelling a housing bubble. He dismissed warnings about subprime mortgages and exotic derivatives. When the crash came in 2008, two years after he left the Fed, the global economy was gutted. The fallout is still with us: austerity, squeezed living standards, and a generation of workers who have never known a proper pay rise.
Some will remember Greenspan as a genius. Others will curse his name. But his impact is undeniable. The UK Treasury’s statement tonight called him “a titan of economic thought”. They praised his role in fostering global financial integration. But for millions on these shores, that very integration brought the 2008 crash and the decade of pain that followed.
Greenspan’s death closes a chapter. But the arguments he ignited — about the power of markets, the role of the state, and who truly benefits from economic growth — will not be buried with him. For those of us who report on wages and the weekly shop, his ghost still haunts our headlines.
