History will record the death of Alan Greenspan, aged 100, as the snapping of a taut wire that once held the great edifice of the American financial system together. For better or worse, and the jury is still out despite the funeral wreaths, this was the man who presided over the apogee of American economic hubris. He was the maestro, the high priest of the free market, the man who spoke in Delphic riddles and moved markets with a cough.
His legacy is not merely a series of interest rate decisions: it is a worldview, a tarnished but still gleaming monument to the idea that markets, if left to their own devices, will self-correct. The dot-com bubble, the 2008 crash – these were not his failures, his disciples will argue. They were the inevitable corrections of a system that had grown too feverish.
But what is undeniable is that Greenspan personified an era. An era of financialisation, of risk privatisation and reward socialisation, of cheap credit and soaring asset prices. He was the sphinx of the Federal Reserve, and now the sphinx is silent.
The American century, with its dollar hegemony and its belief in ever-expanding prosperity, has lost its most articulate champion. The rest of us are left to pick through the ruins of his philosophy, wondering if the next hundred years will be built on a sturdier foundation or merely another cycle of boom and bust. The man is dead.
The question, as always, is whether his ideas will die with him.
