Alan Greenspan, the Fed's 'maestro' and Ayn Rand protégé, dies at 100

Alan Greenspan, the Federal Reserve chair who presided over four decades of American monetary policy — from the Paul Volcker disinflation, through the 1987 crash, the long 1990s expansion, the dotcom bust and the housing bubble that ended at his departure — died on 22 June 2026 at the age of 100. Reuters, citing public records, confirmed his death. Corriere della Sera's economics desk marked the moment with a long-form obituary framing him as the "central banker of finance without rules." The framing was not charitable. It was, in the cold light of 2026, closer to a verdict.

Greenspan's death closes the chapter on a particular kind of American financial authority: the central banker who arrived in Washington as a libertarian intellectual, who deregulated the savings-and-loan industry as a young regulatory official, who sat in the back rooms of Ayn Rand's circle, and who went on to preside over the most aggressive financialisation of the US economy in the country's history. He was, by his own defenders' account, a "maestro" — the word his admirers and critics both reached for. By his detractors', he was something quieter and more consequential: the man who taught a generation of policymakers that markets, left alone, were self-correcting.

The Rand inheritance, recast as policy

Greenspan's early intellectual life is now the part of the biography that does the most work in explaining everything that came after. As NPR noted in its obituary material, the young Greenspan was a close friend and disciple of Ayn Rand, the novelist and polemicist whose objectivist philosophy fused laissez-faire economics with a moral defence of rational self-interest. The relationship shaped his writing before it shaped his policy. His first major essays, in the 1960s, treated the gold standard and antitrust law as moral questions as much as economic ones.

The Rand imprint on Greenspan's later work is not name-dropping. It is structural. The deregulatory turn of the 1980s and 1990s — the unwinding of New Deal supervisory architecture, the hands-off posture toward derivatives, the deferral to bank risk committees — was, in operational terms, the application of a philosophy Greenspan had absorbed at the dinner table before he ever set foot in a central bank. The 2008 financial crisis, when it came, was the moment that philosophy met its most public failure. Greenspan acknowledged as much, in a 2008 congressional appearance, that his faith in the self-correcting properties of free markets had been "flawed." He did not disavow the philosophy. He said only that he had discovered a "flaw" in its application.

The maestro and the bubble he would not name

Between 1987, when he was appointed chair by Ronald Reagan, and January 2006, when he handed the chair to Ben Bernanke, Greenspan's tenure at the Fed was the longest continuous service in the institution's history. The economic record under his watch is genuinely mixed, and a fair reading has to hold both halves of it at once.

The expansion that runs roughly from 1991 to 2001 was, by conventional measures, real. Inflation fell and stayed low. Unemployment dropped to levels not seen in decades. Productivity growth accelerated, and the federal budget moved from chronic deficit to surplus. Greenspan's defenders — and they remain numerous in 2026 — credit his management of expectations, his use of the Fed's communications apparatus as a policy tool, and his willingness to cut rates aggressively when the financial system seized, as in the 1998 Long-Term Capital Management crisis.

But the same period produced the two asset-price bubbles that defined the next decade: the dotcom equity bubble that burst in 2000, and the housing bubble that inflated through the early 2000s and detonated in 2007–08. The Corriere obituary's "finance without rules" line captures the second of these more than the first. Greenspan declined, in repeated testimony and public remarks through 2004 and 2005, to characterise rising US house prices as a bubble. He resisted, in 2005, the creation of a Consumer Financial Protection Agency that would have had authority over mortgage products. He defended the derivatives markets he had helped open up in the 1990s as instruments of risk dispersion rather than risk concentration. By 2008, the world's financial system was running on the assumptions he had championed, and the assumptions were wrong.

The structural verdict

The case against Greenspan, as it has hardened over the past two decades, is not the simple case of a man who got a forecast wrong. Forecasts are cheap; everyone gets them wrong. The structural case is that a central banker who believed, in his own words in 2008, that the "self-interest of lending institutions" would produce market discipline, was given the instruments to test that belief on a national scale. He tested it. The test failed at a cost measured in the millions of foreclosed households, in the trillions of dollars of central-bank balance-sheet expansion that followed, and in the political delegitimisation of monetary policy that the post-2008 era has not resolved.

The Italian framing matters here because it is the framing of a country that watched the eurozone crisis of 2010–12 from the receiving end of the same deregulatory doctrines Greenspan had incubated in Washington. The Corriere line — finance without rules — is what the periphery called the same architecture that the centre called modernisation. The policy choices made in the United States in the 1990s and early 2000s were the policy choices the rest of the world was asked, or required, to adopt through the IMF and the Basel process. The 2008 crisis, on this reading, was not a US accident that the rest of the world caught. It was the export version of a US experiment, and the experiment's author has now died at 100, the most decorated living alumnus of a philosophy that the world has spent fifteen years trying to recover from.

What remains contested

A serious accounting of Greenspan has to hold two things at once. The long expansion under his leadership was real, and the institutional innovations of his tenure — the deliberate management of inflation expectations, the use of forward guidance, the willingness to act decisively in liquidity crises — became permanent parts of the central-bank toolkit. The disasters of his tenure were also real, and they were not acts of nature. They were the predictable consequences of a regulatory posture that treated the institutions under his supervision as though they had earned the trust they had been given.

The sources do not specify a cause of death. The standard reading, that Greenspan's legacy will be re-litigated for as long as there is a Federal Reserve, is the one that holds up to the evidence. What the post-2024 literature on central-bank history has generally added is a more careful separation of Greenspan the forecaster from Greenspan the institution-builder. The first has aged badly. The second has aged well, in places, and poorly in others. The maestro's death does not settle the question. It sharpens it.

This obituary tracks the conventional US wire framing of Greenspan's tenure — the maestro narrative, the 2008 reckoning, the deregulatory inheritance — and reads it against the European periphery reading that Corriere della Sera's "finance without rules" line makes explicit. The two readings are not in tension; they describe the same architecture from two different seats at the table.

Wire provenance

This editorial synthesis draws on the following public wire/social posts:

• http://reut.rs/4xEAiFr
• https://t.me/CorriereDellaSera