Alan Greenspan, the man who came to embody American financial supremacy for nearly two decades, has died at the age of 100. For a generation of British economists and policymakers, his name was synonymous with a certain kind of unassailable market faith: the belief that low inflation, deregulation, and the subtle hand of a central banker could smooth the jagged edges of capitalism. His death, announced this morning, prompts not just a reckoning with his legacy but a quiet reflection on how profoundly American monetary dominance reshaped the British economy and the lives of ordinary people on this side of the Atlantic.
Greenspan took the helm of the Federal Reserve in 1987, a time when London was still shaking off the rust of post-industrial decline. He presided over the long boom of the 1990s, the dot-com mania, and the housing bubble that would ultimately burst. To his admirers, he was the maestro, a man who understood the data better than anyone, who could talk in such convoluted syntax that markets hung on his every Delphic utterance. To his critics, he was the high priest of a dangerous orthodoxy, one that assumed markets were rational and self-correcting, a belief that left regulators asleep at the wheel while subprime mortgages metastasised.
But what does Greenspan mean to the British high street? His policies, transmitted through globalised finance, shaped the cost of borrowing for UK homeowners, the yields on pension funds, and the value of the pound. When Greenspan cut rates after the dot-com crash, the cheap money sloshed across the Atlantic, fuelling a British housing boom that has left a generation locked out of property ownership. When he kept rates low in the early 2000s, it encouraged the debt-fuelled consumption that masked stagnant wages. The 2008 crash, which many lay at his door, exposed the fragility of an economy built on financial services and rising asset prices, leaving towns like Middlesbrough and Margate to bear the human cost of a bust they did not create.
In the years since, the consensus around Greenspanism has shattered. The rise of quantitative easing, the populist backlash against globalisation, the questioning of central bank independence: all are reactions to the era he symbolised. Yet even as Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour and Boris Johnson’s Brexit project both sought to break from the neoliberal playbook, the ghost of Greenspan lingered. The Bank of England, despite its independence, still operated in a shadow cast by the Fed. His death closes a chapter, but the book remains on the shelf, its lessons disputed.
For the public, the obituaries will focus on his aphorisms and his famous affair with Andrea Mitchell. But the real story lies in the quiet anxieties of a generation who grew up believing that house prices only go up, that debt is a tool, not a trap. Greenspan’s legacy is the normalisation of a financialised economy where the line between Main Street and Wall Street blurred, and where the cultural shift from thrift to speculation became a fact of life. As the UK grapples with its own cost-of-living crisis, the echoes of his long boom and its subsequent crash are still audible in every rent payment and every pension statement.
He was a man of his century, a century that believed in progress through markets. The twenty-first has been less kind. Whether his legacy is one of genius or folly depends on where you stand: in a boardroom or in a breadline. But his impact on the texture of everyday life, from the mortgages we take out to the retirement we dream of, is undeniable. Alan Greenspan is dead. The age he shaped is not.
