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Alan Greenspan has died
https://archive.ph/tSlDZ https://archive.ph/tSlDZ
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/22/alan-greenspan-former-chairman-of-the-fed-dies-at-age-100.html https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/22/alan-greenspan-former-chairm...
- jingpostmedia 4mo ago[flagged]
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- firefax 4mo agoNon paywalled obituary: https://apnews.com/article/greenspan-federal-reserve-death-25f435cc747df7b76d0ff40844f8933f https://apnews.com/article/greenspan-federal-reserve-death-2...
- gosub100 4mo agoAside from your attempt to circumvent the supply and demand controls, I find the impact of his contributions highly inflated.
- bhouston 4mo agoI'm not a gold bug but Alan was a proponent of the gold standard. He wrote about how the gold standard created responsible spending and more equality in the world: https://ritholtz.com/2008/11/gold-and-economic-freedom-by-alan-greenspan/ https://ritholtz.com/2008/11/gold-and-economic-freedom-by-al... The world we are in now, especially in the US, is one where there is near unlimited government credit but it is, according to many, papering over deep structural problems. At some point, these chickens will come home to roost in some way or another. But it is hard to predict when. So he was in favour of the gold standard because it prevented massive unconstrained expansion of credit and that seems sensible.
- b40d-48b2-979e 4mo agoHe also oversaw the economy for twenty years before one of the worst recessions in the world. He helped set the stage for multiple disasters with his policies, so I'd take his opinions with a grain of salt.
- bhouston 4mo agoIt was generally 20 years of growth and the 2008 banking crisis actually happened after he left.
- b40d-48b2-979e 4mo agoAnd when production for a system I built burns down the month after I leave my job, the next guy they hire was actually the culprit! Greenspan was seen as responsible for the dot-com bust as well which was solidly in the center of his tenure.
- bhouston 4mo agoI think that this was relatively not known as a major risk far in advance otherwise more traders would have gotten rich. Michael Burry only started to short the market in late 2005, four months before Greenspan's term ended. It is hard to ask Greenspan to have super natural powers of foresight beyond just about everyone else.
- close04 4mo ago> It is hard to ask Greenspan to have super natural powers of foresight beyond just about everyone else. From a person in his position the baseline is "more foresight than just about everyone else". That's why they get the big bucks. If you build something grand on wooden legs and massive debt for the next guy to deal with, or drive into a failure mode even if that's not super obvious, it's not high praise.
- GuinansEyebrows 4mo ago
- fouc 4mo agoMostly I just know Alan Greenspan for being a disciple of Ayn Rand back in the 1950s/60s. Though the Objectivists didn't like his work at the federal reserve. In 2008 he admits to being shocked that banks weren't rationally selfish.
- lucius_verus 4mo agoRelated article from around that time: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2008/10/alan-shrugged/ https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2008/10/alan-shrugged/
- jandrese 4mo agoThe libertarian community really thought they had their fox in the hen house when he was put in charge of regulation, and he did a fair bit of deregulation, but not nearly to the extent that they wanted. In the end it was enough to trigger a major financial crisis, but not enough to completely collapse the world economy and return to the feudalism they wanted.
- tennfown 4mo ago> but not enough to completely collapse the world economy and return to the feudalism they wanted. Don’t worry, wealthy drug addict pedophiles in Silicon Valley are carrying that torch now.
- flumes_whims_ 4mo agoWhat regulations did he as federal reserve chair rollback and which of them caused the 2008 crash?
- anothermathbozo 4mo agoHe killed Brooksley Born’s proposed derivatives regulations in the late 90’s.
- billbrown 4mo agoThe guy who called the Federal Reserve the "penny in the fuse box" of the economy was not an "Ayn Rand disciple" by the time he took the chairmanship. Power as chair of the Council of Economic Advisers under Ford really transformed him and I think severed the tenuous hold he had on her principles.
- shrubble 4mo agoIIRC it was Greenspan that didn’t mean to, but did disclose the use of gold swaps, so even if there is all the gold that is claimed to be in Fort Knox, the question of who owns the gold is unanswered.
- zkmon 4mo ago"Irrational exuberance" - I came to know about him when he said that around 2001. Kinda foresaw the dotcom bubble.
- gertlex 4mo agoI'm probably a fair bit younger. I came to know the phrase, then (of) him, through the flash animation of the Happatai/Yatta song on Albino Black Sheep in the early 2000s (and these days on youtube if you search 'irrational exuberance yatta'; mildly nsfw in a few spots). Never bothered to dig into its meaning, though.
- hed 4mo agoHe said it in 1996.
- jameszol 4mo agoWhen I was in high school in the 90s, and just discovering the world of money and finance, I stumbled on Alan Greenspan and instantly liked some of his thinking about it. I tried my best to learn from everything he did, read every news article I could find, followed rates, the economics of money, the impact on markets, and more. I learned more about government politics and money and influence from that experience than I have since! I'll admit that my mindset about the Fed and money in general is very much due to what I learned in those impressionable years.
- toomuchtodo 4mo agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Greenspan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Greenspan
- readthenotes1 4mo agoMr "moral hazard"-- as if the people profit(eer)ing faced any... I've always wondered if part of the 2008 bust was a psyop from his Ayn Rand beliefs. It probably wasn't as damaging to the world as the Friedman doctrine but it was pretty darn close.
- mempko 4mo agoHere is an old clip of Alan Greenspan explaining to Paul Ryan why the social security system can't go bankrupt. https://youtu.be/DNCZHAQnfGU?is=CWQS-QUJB0z4EfSM https://youtu.be/DNCZHAQnfGU?is=CWQS-QUJB0z4EfSM
- fumeux_fume 4mo agoA very Economist answer to Ryan's question. So basically, no.
- mediumsmart 4mo agotime to watch inside job from 2010 again
- kzrdude 4mo agoGreenspan was also the subject in the weird comics "h4x0r economist"/"haxor economist", which thankfully still live on since its early internet days https://www.rdwarf.com/users/kioh/ https://www.rdwarf.com/users/kioh/ (NSFW language)
- chadgpt3 4mo agoI don't get this comic at all but I really miss when random stuff like this got published online!
- kzrdude 4mo agoYeah I think it's very immature and borderline, at least in rearview mirror. After going through I came back to this tame comic which was the one I remember I actually got a kick out of as really funny back then: https://www.rdwarf.com/users/kioh/haxorec47.jpg https://www.rdwarf.com/users/kioh/haxorec47.jpg (Theme: Greenspan n DnD)
- AndrewSwift 4mo agoThis should be the top comment, at least for today.
- thakoppno 4mo agoChaos theory and all but my career in tech doesn’t happen without haxor economist. My Econ major collided with it somehow and a year later ended up with a CS degree.
- aj7 4mo agoHe was proof that the position is a figurehead.
- ChrisArchitect 4mo agoNYT obituary: Alan Greenspan, Fed Chairman Through Prosperity and Crisis, Dies at 100 non-paywall: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/22/us/alan-greenspan-dead.html?unlocked_article_code=1.sFA.plJP.xuXhN1G4dEtg&smid=url-share https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/22/us/alan-greenspan-dead.ht...
- helterskelter 4mo agoInteresting bit of trivia, Greenspan was in Ayn Rand's inner circle and read her drafts of Atlas Shrugged as it was being written, and they were close friends until her death.
- zackmorris 4mo agoRevisionist history will tell it differently, but I remember that from the mid 1990s until about 2000 when the economy was booming yet prices weren't rising, Greenspan publicly indicated that he wasn't sure exactly why that was. Or at least that the information economy had different performance characteristics than the industrial economy, since production wasn't limited by supply but by worker productivity multipliers. Why did the cost of living decrease in the 90s but not today? What was different then vs now? Well, after the Dot Bomb and 9/11, the US hasn't followed macroeconomic principles (the main principle being to raise interest rates during increased production to prevent inflation), examine the flip after 2000: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/richard-clarida-085777125_wearepimco-federalreserve-ai-activity-7404297364837933056-THy0 https://www.linkedin.com/posts/richard-clarida-085777125_wea... Breadcrumbs: https://financialpost.com/news/alan-greenspan-dies-at-100 https://financialpost.com/news/alan-greenspan-dies-at-100 (alternative article) https://www.federalreserve.gov/boarddocs/speeches/1999/19990506.htm https://www.federalreserve.gov/boarddocs/speeches/1999/19990... (example speech) https://www.dallasfed.org/~/media/documents/research/swe/2000/swe0003b.pdf https://www.dallasfed.org/~/media/documents/research/swe/200... (analysis pdf) Note that policy had a greater effect on US economic decline than who the Fed chair was. Specifically, the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA) known as the Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999 (which reversed the Glass–Steagall Act of 1933 and removed barriers in the market among banking companies, securities companies, and insurance companies) allowed investors to gamble with our savings again like before the Great Depression: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gramm-Leach-Bliley_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gramm-Leach-Bliley_Act The Housing Bubble popped less than a decade later in 2008. The Telecommunications Act of 1996 had deregulated the information economy, cementing the duopolies we see today, although the fallout from that arguably wasn't felt until after the arrival of fast mobile internet that coincided with the 2008 financial crisis, which contributed to the high communications prices we pay today vs the rest of the world (imposing a kind of privatized tax on the information economy): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecommunications_Act_of_1996 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecommunications_Act_of_1996 What I saw then was the last hurrah of US colonialism, which patterned itself off of England but used proxy wars instead of direct colonization. Loosely, keeping Asia down supported western antisocialist goals while simultaneously bolstering capitalist economies. In other words, buying shoes for $5 and selling them for $100 (times everything) allowed the US to transition from blue collar to white collar work. That resulted in the US closing 100,000 factories under the GW Bush administration of the 2000s. And also outsourcing to China and India, the reduction of pure R&D to almost nothing, massive investment in McMansions and SUVs instead of something like renewable energy, and of course diverting perhaps $3 trillion or more to forever wars in the Middle East to prop up the declining industrial economy which depends on fossil fuels. That's all changing now as China's buying power is passing that of the US: https://www.capitaleconomics.com/blog/china-versus-us-size-stakes-its-what-you-measure-counts https://www.capitaleconomics.com/blog/china-versus-us-size-s... They don't want to make our stuff for pennies on the dollar anymore, and the US can't carry its own weight without massive reeducation and retooling. But since the US wasted $40 trillion on its national debt instead of investing in the 21st century economy we thought we are going to get in the 90s, we now see prices increasing in parity with wages. In other words, nearly all excess labor productivity goes towards paying the debt ran up by the previous generation. Thomas Jefferson warned against this: https://www.meteor.iastate.edu/gccourse/develop/jefferson.html https://www.meteor.iastate.edu/gccourse/develop/jefferson.ht... The young are paying the elderly's retirement while being told to eat less avocado toast. The reason I'm writing this is that the powers that be will try to tell you that we need to cut government spending and taxes to outrun our economic decline. But if you understand everything I just wrote, then you'll see that the damage of 40 years of trickle-down economics and austerity has already been done. The way out of this is self-evidently to try new approaches favored by the youth who are doing the work but not seeing the benefits like previous generations did. We're living in a second Gilded Age dominated by wage slavery and high wealth inequality: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilded_Age https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilded_Age The way we overcame that was to do the opposite of everything you see the establishment promoting today: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_Era https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_Era The low-hanging fruit is getting money out of politics (reversing the Citizens United decision), closing the revolving door between the government and lobbyists, antitrust enforcement, and other popular goals. But real progress looks like FDR-style New Deal taxation on the ultra-wealthy to pay down the public debt, forgiveness of private debts incurred by artificially inflated costs (jubilee) and public funding of the commons (education, healthcare, the energy and communications grids, anything that results in natural monopolies). Greenspan wouldn't have liked what I just wrote at the end there. But he would have supported the ending of intergenerational debt IMHO. That's why I think it makes a good target for today's youth, when they need a litmus test for deciding whether voting for a proposed policy is in their best interest.
- devilfileprong 4mo ago[flagged]
- alberth 4mo agoFor many Americans, Greenspan was the only Fed Chair known widely by name by the general public.
- NoboruWataya 4mo agoI'm not from the US and was born after Greenspan took up the position but I thought Paul Volcker was a pretty well known name during his tenure?
- rootusrootus 4mo agoMaybe GP meant Americans alive today. Volcker is probably memorable mostly to an age bracket swiftly shrinking.
- unregistereddev 4mo agoDuring his tenure, yes. Volcker remains famous among finance nerds, because it turns out he was right. He caused a recession and risked his own job, but in doing so he successfully reigned in runaway inflation. While Volcker was controversial in his time and celebrated later, Greenspan was widely respected in his day. I remember Greenspan being sought for interviews national television to help explain finance topics to the general public.
- FabHK 4mo agoThere's a fairly obscure T-shirt designed by FT Alphaville that just cryptically says "Allen, Ben, Janet, Jay" ;-)
- pjs_ 4mo agoHighly recommend the extremely good multipart documentary All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace by Adam Curtis for a fun and wide ranging if slightly silly look at the nexus of Greenspan, Ayn Rand, Silicon Valley, computer technology etc
- boppo1 4mo agoHow did a guy who wrote that "gold and economic freedom" wind up running two decades of LIRP?
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- collabs 4mo agoI am so confused... so he was a proponent of gold standard but also supported low interest rates and the "Greenspan PUT"?
- twoodfin 4mo agoMy favorite bit of Greenspan lore: Texas Senator Phil Gramm (pretty sure it was him) was a prominent GOP member of the Senate Banking Committee. Of course, Greenspan often testified there. Gramm would always ask Greenspan, along with his other questions, “Mr. Chairman, what’s the ideal capital gains tax rate?” Greenspan never missed a beat: “Zero.” Agree or disagree, you always knew where he stood!
- franktankbank 4mo agoHILARIOUS!
- KingMob 4mo ago> Agree or disagree, you always knew where he stood! This is always such a weird phrasing to me. We collectively praise politicians for this (and admittedly, many of them will just say anything to get elected), but the phrase discourages the idea that learning and changing your mind is valuable. (Not trying to single you out, just writing about how we collectively do this. I'm sure I've done it in the past.)
- twoodfin 4mo agoThe phrasing was indeed trite. The anecdote was intended to highlight the directness of his answer rather than the constancy of his position.
- lowbloodsugar 4mo agoThis is the guy who told everyone to save money by buying property with ARMs and then, post crash, admitted to congress that there a flaw in his economic theory. No shit.
- love0972 4mo agoHe shaped global monetary policy for nearly two decades. His 2008 admission that his free-market ideology had a "flaw" was one of the most honest moments in central banking history.
- rkrbaccord 4mo agoJe crois et en effet tandis: enfin l'art de raffiné fe reduit language bien faire. Mon ouvrage s'es transforme infenfiblement entre mes mains, dans qi'il m'ait été. [0]: Lavoisier, Traité élémentaire de chimie : présenté dans un ordre nouveau.