Here lies the man who turned the American dream into a casino with better lighting. Alan Greenspan, the dollar-bill wizard who convinced a generation that the business cycle was a myth and that deregulation was a free lunch, has finally taken his final bow. He was 100 years old, or as economists call it, 'the long run'.
Greenspan's career was a masterclass in the art of the con. He presided over the Federal Reserve for 18 years, a tenure so long that he saw five presidents come and go, each more bewildered by his economic mysticism than the last. His legacy? A colossal bubble in everything, from stocks to houses to the very idea that markets could police themselves. When he finally admitted in 2008 that he had 'found a flaw' in his ideology, the global economy was already choking on its own hubris.
But let's not be churlish. The man had style. He spoke in such convoluted sentences that even he seemed surprised when they ended. He carried a briefcase that probably contained nothing but a thermos of hubris and a signed photo of Ayn Rand. Ah, Ayn Rand. The philosopher queen of selfishness, whose Objectivism gave Greenspan moral cover to believe that greed was not just good, but mathematically inevitable. He was her protégé, and he repaid her faith by turning her ideas into monetary policy. The result was a society where the rich got richer and the rest got a lecture about 'creative destruction' while their jobs were shipped to Guangdong.
Greenspan's greatest trick was convincing everyone that he was a genius. He was the 'Maestro', the 'Oracle', the man who could fine-tune the economy like a Stradivarius. In truth, he was a man with a single tune: cheap money, low regulation, and a fervent belief that the invisible hand would work things out. It worked out, alright. It worked out like a dodgy knee replacement on a marathon runner.
Now he's dead. And what do we have to show for his century of existence? A financial system that is still propped up by government guarantees, a wealth gap that would make a Victorian novel blush, and a lingering suspicion that the whole thing was a circus and we were the clowns. The obituaries will be polite, as they always are. They will mention his 'steady hand' and his 'intellectual rigour'. But they will omit the inconvenient truth: that Alan Greenspan was the high priest of a religion that turned out to be a cargo cult. We are still waiting for the ships to come in.
So raise a glass of cheap gin (the kind he would have deregulated) to the man who gave us financial chaos and called it equilibrium. He lived 100 years, but his ideas will haunt us longer. As he shuffles off this mortal coil, let us remember his most famous quote: 'I know you think you understand what you thought I said, but I'm not sure you realise that what you heard is not what I meant.' Indeed. Goodbye, Alan. You meant nothing, and it was everything.
