Former Fed Chair Alan Greenspan (1987-2006) died yesterday at 100.  He served under four presidents and oversaw the largest expansion of the U.S. economy led by a remarkable bull-market fueled by low interest rates and low unemployment. He may be best remembered for coining the phrase “Irrational Exuberance” to describe the dot com bubble in the late 1990s. 

However, many claim that his cheap money policies and laissez-faire approach to capitalism and regulation laid the groundwork for the Financial Crisis in 2008 (two years after he stepped down as Fed Chair).

Roger Ferguson, a vice chairman of the Fed from 1999-2006 noted, “Alan Greenspan deserves to be remembered as one of the great central bankers of the second half of the 20th century, in a global context, not just at the Fed.  He was among the first to recognize the impact of technology on increasing productivity in the US, allowing the economy to grow faster than we had thought without inflation.”