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Alan Greenspan (born March 6, 1926) is an American economist who served as Chairman of the Federal Reserve of the United States from 1987 to 2006. He currently works as a private advisor and provides consulting for firms through his company, Greenspan Associates LLC. First appointed Federal Reserve chairman by President Ronald Reagan in August 1987, he was reappointed at successive four-year intervals until retiring on January 31, 2006 after the second-longest tenure in the position.

Biography

Greenspan was born in 1926 in the Washington Heights area of New York City. He was born into a Jewish family. The family of Herbert Greenspan, Alan's father, was of German-Jewish descent. Alan’s mother, Rose Goldsmith was of Polish descent. He is an accomplished clarinet and saxophone player who played with Stan Getz when they were in school together. He studied clarinet at The Juilliard School from 1943 to 1944, when he dropped out to join a professional jazz band. He returned to college in 1945, attending New York University (NYU), where he received a B.S. in Economics (summa cum laude) in 1948 and an M.A. in Economics in 1950. Greenspan went on to Columbia University, intending to pursue advanced economic studies, but subsequently dropped out. At Columbia, Greenspan did study economics under the tutelage of future Fed chairman Arthur Burns, who constantly warned of the dangers of inflation. Much later, in 1977, NYU also awarded him a Ph.D. in Economics. Unfortunately, his dissertation is not available from NYU since it was removed at Greenspan's request in 1987, when he became Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board. However, a single copy has been found, and interestingly the 'introduction includes a discussion of soaring housing prices and their effect on consumer spending; it even anticipates a bursting housing bubble'. On December 14, 2005, he was awarded an honorary Doctor of Commercial Science degree by NYU, his fourth degree from that institution.

In the early 1950s, Greenspan began an association with famed novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand that would last until her death in 1982. He wrote for Rand’s newsletters and authored several essays in her book Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal . Rand stood beside him at his 1974 swearing-in as Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers.

From 1948 to 1953, Greenspan worked as an economic analyst at The Conference Board, a business and industry oriented think-tank in New York City. From 1955 to 1987, when he was appointed as chairman of the Federal Reserve, Greenspan was chairman and president of Townsend-Greenspan & Co., Inc., an economic consulting firm in New York City, a 33-year stint interrupted only from 1974 to 1977 by his service as Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Gerald Ford. In the summer of 1968, Greenspan agreed to serve Richard Nixon as his coordinator on domestic policy in the nomination campaign. Greenspan also has served as a corporate director for Aluminum Company of America (Alcoa); Automatic Data Processing, Inc.; Capital Cities/ABC, Inc.; General Foods, Inc.; J.P. Morgan & Co., Inc.; Morgan Guaranty Trust Company of New York; Mobil Corporation; and The Pittston Company. He was a director of the Council on Foreign Relations foreign policy organization between 1982 and 1988. He also served as a member of the influential Washington-based financial advisory body, the Group of Thirty in 1984.

Alan Greenspan has been married twice. His first marriage was to an artist named Joan Mitchell in 1952; the marriage ended in annulment less than a year later. He dated newswoman Barbara Walters in the late 1970s. In 1984, Greenspan began dating journalist Andrea Mitchell. Greenspan at the time was 58, and the also divorced Mitchell was 20 years younger. In 1997, they were married by Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Greenspan and Objectivism

Greenspan was introduced to Ayn Rand by his first wife, Joan Mitchell. Although Greenspan was initially a logical positivist, he was converted to Rand's philosophy of Objectivism by her associate Nathaniel Branden. During the 1950s and 1960s Greenspan was a proponent of Objectivism, writing articles for Objectivist newsletters and contributing several essays for Rand's 1966 book Capitalism: the Unknown Ideal including an essay supporting the gold standard.

During the 1970s, Greenspan was one of the members of Ayn Rand's inner circle, the Ayn Rand Collective, who read Atlas Shrugged while it was being written. Rand nicknamed Greenspan "the undertaker" because of his penchant for dark clothing and reserved demeanor. Although Greenspan was once recognized as a proponent of laissez-faire capitalism, some Objectivists find his support for a gold standard somewhat incongruous or dubious, given the Federal Reserve's role in America's fiat money system and endogenous inflation. He has come under criticism from Harry Binswanger, who believes his actions while at work for the Federal Reserve and his publicly expressed opinions on other issues show abandonment of Objectivist and free market principles. However, when questioned in relation to this, he has said that in a democratic society individuals have to make compromises with each other over conflicting ideas of how money should be handled. He said he himself had to make such compromises, because he believes that "we did extremely well" without a central bank and with a gold standard. Greenspan and Rand maintained a close relationship until her death in 1982.

In a congressional hearing on October 23, 2008 Greenspan admitted that his free-market ideology shunning certain regulations was flawed. This has caused backlash from Objectivist thinkers, blaming the economic crisis on Greenspan's pandering to the mixed economy and betraying his laissez-faire views.

Chairman of the Federal Reserve

On June 2, 1987, President Reagan nominated Dr. Greenspan as a successor to Paul Volcker as chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve, and the Senate confirmed him on August 11, 1987. After the nomination, bond markets experienced their biggest one-day drop in 5 years. Just two months after his confirmation he was faced with his first crisis — the 1987 stock market crash. Noted investor, author and commentator Jim Rogers has claimed that Alan Greenspan has lobbied to get this chairmanship.

His terse statement that the Fed "affirmed today its readiness to serve as a source of liquidity to support the economic and financial system" is seen by many as having been effective in helping to control the damage from that crash.

His handling of monetary policy in the run-up to the 1991 recession was criticized from the right as being excessively tight, and costing George H. W. Bush re-election. The incoming Democratic president Bill Clinton reappointed Alan Greenspan, and kept him as a core member of his economic team. Greenspan, while still fundamentally monetarist in orientation, argued that doctrinaire application of theory was insufficiently flexible for central banks to meet emerging situations.

Another famous example of the effect of his closely parsed comments was his December 5 , 1996 remark about "irrational exuberance and unduly escalating stock prices" that led Japanese stocks to fall 3.2%.

During the Asian financial crisis of 1997—1998, the Federal Reserve flooded the world with dollars, and organized a bailout of Long-Term Capital Management. Some have argued that 1997-1998 represented a monetary policy bind — as the early 1970s had represented a fiscal policy bind — and that while asset inflation had crept into the United States, demanding that the Fed tighten, the Federal Reserve needed to ease liquidity in response to the capital flight from Asia. Greenspan himself noted this when he stated that the American stock market showed signs of irrationally high valuations.

In 2000, Alan Greenspan raised interest rates several times; these actions were believed by many to have caused the bursting of the dot-com bubble. In autumn of 2001, as a decisive reaction to September 11 attacks and the various corporate scandals which undermined the economy, the Greenspan-led Federal Reserve initiated a series of interest cuts that brought down the Federal Funds rate to 1% in 2004. His critics, notably Steve Forbes, attributed the rapid rise in commodity prices and gold to Greenspan's loose monetary policy which is causing excessive asset inflation and a weak dollar. By late 2004 the price of gold was higher than its 12-year moving average.

On May 18, 2004, Greenspan was nominated by President George W. Bush to serve for an unprecedented fifth term as chairman of the Federal Reserve. He was previously appointed to the post by Presidents Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton.

Greenspan's term as a member of the Board ended on January 31, 2006, and Ben Bernanke was confirmed as his successor.

Alan Greenspan is blamed by the followers of the Austrian School for creating excessive liquidity which caused lending standards to deteriorate resulting in the housing bubble of 2004-2006 and the market meltdown beginning in 2008. Currently the American Federal Reserve follows a modified form of monetarism, where broader ranges of intervention are possible in light of temporary instabilities in market dynamics.

After the Federal Reserve

On February 26, 2007, Greenspan forecast a possible

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