Alan Greenspan

Alan Greenspan was born on March 6, 1926, in the Washington Heights neighborhood of New York City, the only child of Herbert Greenspan, a stockbroker, and Rose Goldsmith. Raised largely by his mother after his parents' divorce, young Alan showed remarkable gifts early — by age five he could recite baseball batting averages and perform complex arithmetic in his head, a precocity that would shape a lifetime of devotion to data and empirical analysis. His path to economics was not direct. Greenspan first enrolled at the Juilliard School to study clarinet and saxophone, and for a brief period performed jazz professionally. Yet the pull of ideas proved stronger than music. He enrolled at New York University's Stern School of Business in 1945, earning a bachelor's degree in economics summa cum laude in 1948 and a master's degree in 1950. Advanced studies under Arthur F. Burns at Columbia University deepened his theoretical grounding, and in 1977 NYU awarded him a doctorate based on his published writings — a testament to the practical weight of his intellectual output. In the early 1950s, Greenspan joined the circle of philosopher and novelist Ayn Rand, whose objectivist ideas reinforced his conviction in free markets. Rand became, in his own words, "a stabilizing force" in his life, and the two remained close friends until her death in 1982. His consulting firm, Townsend-Greenspan & Co., established his reputation as one of Wall Street's most astute economic minds. President Gerald Ford appointed him Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers in 1974. Then, in 1987, President Ronald Reagan elevated him to Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board — a post he would hold for nearly nineteen years across four presidencies. During that tenure he guided the nation through Black Monday, the Asian financial crisis, the dot-com collapse, and the aftermath of September 11. His celebrated phrase "irrational exuberance," coined in a 1996 speech, entered the permanent lexicon of financial markets. Colleagues and historians would come to call him "the Maestro." On April 6, 1997, Greenspan married NBC News Washington correspondent Andrea Mitchell in a ceremony officiated by Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg — a union that lasted twenty-nine devoted years. After retiring from the Fed in 2006 he founded Greenspan Associates LLC and continued writing and advising into his late nineties. He passed away on June 22, 2026, at his home in Washington, D.C., at the age of one hundred, from complications of Parkinson's disease. He is remembered as one of the most consequential economic stewards in American history.