The architect of modern financial chaos has finally laid down his blueprints. Alan Greenspan, the man who turned the US economy into a high-stakes game of roulette with other people's pensions, has shuffled off this mortal coil at the ripe old age of 100.
Greenspan, the former Federal Reserve chairman, was the high priest of deregulation, the bard of bubbles, and the chap who convinced everyone that markets were self-regulating. Which is a bit like believing a pack of wolves will police their own appetites. Under his watch, the economy ballooned into a glorious, unsustainable orgy of speculation. He slashed interest rates like a discount butcher, fuelling the dot-com mania and later the housing frenzy. When asked about the looming subprime crisis, he famously shrugged and said markets would sort it out. They did, after a fashion, by plunging the world into the Great Recession.
Greenspan was a master of obfuscation. His speeches were so dense and jargon-laden that traders would parse them like ancient runes, searching for hidden meanings. He once said 'I guess I should warn you, if I turn out to be particularly clear, you've probably misunderstood what I said.' A man who made a virtue of confusion.
His legacy is a monument to the religion of laissez-faire, a faith that held until its temples collapsed in 2008. Now he joins the choir invisible, perhaps to explain to Adam Smith why his invisible hand turned into a fist.
So raise a toast of airport gin to the Maestro, the man who proved that a single person can, with enough unchecked power, build a house of cards that takes a generation to sweep up. Greenspan is dead. Long live the chaos.
