Alan Greenspan, the man who arguably shaped the financial DNA of the late 20th century, has died at the age of 100. The former Federal Reserve chairman, whose tenure spanned the dot-com boom, the 1987 Black Monday crash, and the early 2000s recession, leaves behind a legacy as complex as the algorithms now running our markets. The City of London, that ancient square mile of glass and stone where fortunes are made and erased, has lowered its flags.
Traders paused, for a moment, between the flashing screens. Greenspan was the last of the human central bankers, a maestro whose every word moved trillions. In an age where AI models now predict interest rate movements with eerie accuracy, his death feels like a full stop on an era where intuition and data danced a delicate waltz.
He believed markets were rational, a faith that now seems quaint in our age of meme stocks and algorithmic flash crashes. Yet his fingerprints are everywhere: from the deregulation that fuelled innovation to the quantitative easing playbook used in every crisis since. The 'Greenspan put' became legend, the belief that the Fed would always save the markets.
It worked, until it didn't. His critics argue his low-interest-rate policy inflated the housing bubble that nearly broke the world in 2008. But for the City, he was a titan.
A man who understood that finance is a human story, even when it lives in the cloud. As quantum computing threatens to upend our entire economic model, Greenspan's death reminds us that the system is still, at its core, built on trust. And that is something no algorithm can replicate.