WASHINGTON (AP) — US Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan has died at the age of 100.

He died on Monday from complications of Parkinson’s Disease, said his wife of 29 years, NBC News correspondent Andrea Mitchell.

“To me he was my husband, who shaped my life from our very first date in 1984,” Mitchell said. “He had ‘irrational exuberance’ for baseball, the Washington Commanders, tennis, golf, and music, especially jazz. He will be remembered for his brilliance and his kindness. Being his life partner was the joy of my life.”

In his 18.5 years at the helm of the Fed, Greenspan presided over a sustained era of American growth and prosperity, yet one that ended with devastating consequences in 2008, two years after he had left the central bank.

Greenspan was so respected during his many years as head of the world’s most influential central bank that by the time he stepped down in 2006, he was widely celebrated as the “Oracle’’ and “Maestro,” a virtuoso who nurtured America’s economic well-being and whose nearly every utterance was parsed for clues as to where interest rates, the economy and the financial markets might be headed.

Greenspan’s reputation suffered a serious setback, however, when the American housing market collapsed, igniting a global financial crisis that nearly toppled the US banking system and plunged the economy into the worst recession since the 1930s. Critics pinned much of the blame for the crisis on Greenspan’s easy-money policies and on what they believed was an overexuberant faith in lightly supervised financial markets.

Greenspan himself later acknowledged that “I made a mistake’’ in assuming the nation’s banks, whose stability undergirds the financial system and the entire economy, could essentially regulate themselves.

Greenspan’s intentions were so intensely theorized that it gave birth to new Fed folklore: The “Briefcase Indicator.” A stuffed briefcase carried into Fed meetings implied changes may be afoot because Greenspan carried with him charts and research to make his point.

Greenspan’s reputation suffered almost as soon as he left the Fed in 2006, however. American housing prices began to slide, then accelerated into a dizzying plunge that inflicted huge losses for banks, pension funds and other investors that had bet heavily on real estate. As housing values plummeted, millions of Americans, many of them stuck with outsize mortgage debt, lost homes to foreclosure. The spiraling financial crisis sent the US economy sinking into the Great Recession of 2007-2009, the worst downturn since the Great Depression of the 1930s.

The crisis in the US spread overseas rapidly, leading to a debt crisis for nations in Europe, and it led Beijing to engineer a massive government stimulus package to stabilize its economy.

In hindsight, critics assigned much of the blame for the crisis to Greenspan’s easy-money policies, his faith in lightly supervised financial markets and his lax attention to the reckless risk-taking that had flourished in the financial system under his watch. Later, Greenspan admitted that “I made a mistake’’ in assuming that the nation’s banks, whose stability undergirds the financial system and the entire economy, could essentially regulate themselves.

Until then, however, it seemed that Greenspan could do no wrong. Not only in........

© The Times of Israel