He once moved global markets with two words.
Today, those markets paused for him.
Alan Greenspan is dead at 100.
The man they called the Maestro.
His wife, NBC's Andrea Mitchell, confirmed he died Monday from complications of Parkinson's disease.
Just three months after Jerome Powell publicly wished him a happy 100th birthday from the Fed itself.
Before the suits. Before the Fed. Before the world hung on his sentences…
Greenspan played clarinet and sax in Woody Herman's jazz band.
He studied at Juilliard.
His first job as an economist? $45 a week.
He didn't even finish his PhD until age 51.
Reagan appointed him Fed Chair on August 11, 1987.
69 days later: Black Monday.
The Dow crashed 22.6% in a single session — still the biggest one-day drop in history.
Greenspan's response was simple. Flood the system with liquidity.
It worked. The Dow clawed back half its losses in 48 hours. A legend was born.
Greenspan didn't speak. He Greenspanned.
Long, winding sentences designed to confuse Congress, soothe markets, and reveal absolutely nothing.
His own confession, years later:
"It's a language of purposeful obfuscation… I proceed with four or five sentences which get increasingly obscure. The congressman thinks I answered the question and goes on to the next one."
👉 Two words, though, slipped through that fog and shook the world:
"Irrational exuberance."
December 5, 1996. Tokyo dropped 3% before he finished his coffee.
His 19-year run touched everything:
Fortune's verdict in 1996: "In Greenspan We Trust."
Then 2008 happened.
Critics pinned the housing bubble on his cheap-money "Greenspan put." His defense? "This one, I'm innocent."
January 2026. At 99 years old.
Greenspan signed a joint letter with Yellen, Bernanke and a dozen other former officials — defending Jerome Powell against an "unprecedented" criminal probe under Trump.
A last stand for Fed independence. From the man who defined it.
Late in life, he stopped trusting the math.
"Fear and euphoria are dominant forces," he said. "And fear is many multiples the size of euphoria."
The Maestro spent a century studying markets.
And in the end, he admitted the truth every trader feels but never says out loud.
Markets aren't run by models.
They're run by emotions.
That's all for now!
