Alan Greenspan Biography

Alan Greenspan was chairman of the Federal Reserve, and one of the most powerful financial men in America, from 1987 until his retirement in 2006.

Alan Greenspan had a brief fling as a professional jazz saxophonist before attending New York University; Greenspan “received a B.S. in economics (summa cum laude) in 1948, an M.A. in economics in 1950, and a Ph.D. in economics in 1977, all from New York University,” according to a later biography from the Federal Reserve. He became head of an economics consulting firm, Townsend-Greenspan & Co., in New York in 1954.

Greenspan flourished, and by the 1970s he was advising presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. In 1987 he was named Chairman of the Board of Governors for the Federal Reserve System. Greenspan went on to hold the post under presidents Ronald Reagan, George Bush the elder, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.

As chairman, Greenspan was largely responsible for directing U.S. national monetary policy; he is often credited with keeping inflation at historically low levels, and is sometimes criticized for the boom-and-bust nature of the economy in the so-called “dot-com” era of the 1990s.

Greenspan stepped down from the post on January 31, 2006, and was succeeded by former Princeton economics department chair Ben Bernanke. Alan Greenspan’s memoir, The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World, was published in 2007. Late in life he contracted Parkinson’s disease, but he lived to be 100 before dying of complications in 2026.