The man who reshaped the global economy has left the building. Alan Greenspan, the former Federal Reserve chairman whose words could move markets and whose policies defined an era of deregulation, died today at 100. Tributes have poured in from the City, where his legacy is still debated over expensive lunches.
To understand Greenspan is to understand the transformation of finance from a utility into a religion. He presided over the dot-com boom, the housing bubble, and the belief that markets could self-correct. He was a master of obfuscation, a man who spoke in paragraphs that said nothing but sounded profound.
Yet for all his influence, the human cost of his ideology is still being counted: the hollowed-out manufacturing towns, the gig economy, the wealth gap that became a chasm. On the streets, people remember the 2008 crash not as a footnote but as a trauma that shaped their lives. Greenspan's legacy is not just the S&P 500 but the precariousness of modern life.
The tributes will be grand, but the real reckoning is still to come.