Alan Greenspan, the man who pulled the levers of the global economy for nearly two decades, is dead at 100. The former Federal Reserve chairman, a man whose every utterance could move markets, passed away quietly, sources confirm. No cause of death has been released, but for a man who lived through the Great Depression, the dot-com bubble, and the 2008 financial crisis, the final reckoning is perhaps the only balance sheet he couldn't fudge.
Greenspan's legacy is a tangled web of deregulation, low interest rates, and blind faith in markets. He was the high priest of the 'Greenspan put,' the belief that the Fed would always save Wall Street from its own greed. And it did, until it couldn't. The 2008 crash, a direct consequence of the deregulatory fervour he championed, exposed the rot. Yet Greenspan walked away with his reputation largely intact, a testament to the power of a well-tailored suit and a carefully ambiguous phrase.
Uncovered documents from his tenure show a man who was more than happy to look the other way. He famously claimed that banks would self-regulate because their executives had 'skin in the game.' We all know how that turned out. The 2008 crisis obliterated that fantasy, but Greenspan never really apologised. He went on to write memoirs, consult, and collect speaking fees, a comfortable retirement built on the ashes of millions of ruined lives.
Now he's gone. The obituaries will hail him as a genius, a titan of central banking. But for those of us who watched the foreclosure signs go up, who saw the bailout money flow to the very architects of the crisis, his death is a moment to reflect on the cost of unchecked power. Greenspan wasn't just a man. He was a symbol of an era when the rich got richer and the rest of us were told to just trust the system.
His legacy is now in the hands of historians. But the stench of 2008 still lingers. And as the markets dip on this news, remember: the system he built is still standing. The same deregulated financial casino, the same bailout mentality, the same inequality. Greenspan is dead. But the rot he helped institutionalise? That's going to take a lot more than a few eulogies to clean up.
In the coming days, expect a flood of tributes from corporate boardrooms and political fundraising dinners. Don't buy it. Look at the numbers. Look at the foreclosures, the wage stagnation, the gap between Main Street and Wall Street. That was his monument. And now he's gone, leaving us to pick up the pieces of a broken economy he never had to live with.
