Special Report: Alan Greenspan Dies at 100

**David Westin** (0:01)
This is Breaking News from Bloomberg.

**Paul Sweeney** (0:05)
Some breaking news at the moment. Alan Greenspan, the influential economist, who steered US monetary policy during his five terms as chairman of the Federal Reserve under four presidents, died Monday, his wife said in a statement. He was 100, this is according to NBC. Right now, let's go to David Westin with some thoughts on the life of Alan Greenspan.

**David Westin** (0:25)
Greenspan's first exposure to the global financial system he would lead came playing the clarinet in a jazz band at a New Hampshire resort in 1944 Not really understanding at the time that the delegates gathered one floor below him were working through what would become the Bretton Woods Accords.

**Alan Greenspan** (0:43)
I was at the Mount Washington Hotel in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire.
I didn't have a clue what all of that noise around me was. And somebody said, there was a big convention here. I said, oh, too bad. I didn't think about it again for 75 years.

**David Westin** (1:05)
43 years later, he'd gone from playing in the band to becoming simply the chairman, presiding over the Federal Reserve for nearly 20 years. That's the second longest tenure in history.
Known for supporting the economy through what became known as the Greenspan Put that helped give the United States unprecedented prosperity through the 1990s. Alan Greenspan was the first to admit he didn't know everything. Not even he could have anticipated something never taught in economics, the possibility of negative interest rates.

**Alan Greenspan** (1:35)
How in the world did we end up with negative interest rates?
Interest rates are a major component of what kind of is called time preference. It's the extent of discounting human beings make about values today versus values tomorrow.

**David Westin** (1:57)
But to the end, Chair Greenspan remained focused on the big questions that he found timeless, and especially on the threat posed by our looming national deficit.

**Alan Greenspan** (2:06)
The one thing that has been a very considerable surprise in recent years is the extent to which unequivocally entitlements of crowding out gross domestic savings, dollar for dollar. To get that changed is a huge political issue.

**David Westin** (2:26)
Though he has been gone from his position at the top of the Federal Reserve for over a quarter century, the hole that he leaves will continue on well into the future.

**Paul Sweeney** (2:35)
That was Bloomberg's David Westin with some thoughts on the passing of Alan Greenspan, former Fed Chair Alan Greenspan, who died today at the age of 100 So, Isabelle Lee joining me. Tom Keen is off today. Isabelle Lee, so some big news, an influential voice to say the least five terms as chairman of the Federal Reserve under four presidents.

**Isabelle Lee** (2:56)
And he achieves celebrity status, I think, under President Bill Clinton when stock soared to record highs. I think The Economist magazine dubbed him a rock star and a lot of his admirers call him the maestro, definitely a revered former Fed Chair.

**Paul Sweeney** (3:08)
Yeah, I mean, 100 years down to this is a heck of a run. James Egelhof joins us here. He's the chief US economist for BNP Paribas. He's in our Bloomberg interactive broker studio. James, just huge news from folks like economists, market watchers, Alan Greenspan, just a monumental figure.

**James Egelhof** (3:24)
A huge figure in the history of the Federal Reserve, really a dominant figure in the way the Fed communicates with markets, the way the Fed operates in markets. Much of what we debate, including this past week, is a reaction to his legacy.
What is the role of the chair versus the rest of the committee? Alan Greenspan was an overarching than life figure who set policy pretty much independently. The way he communicates, the way he would walk around with a big briefcase or a small briefcase to signal rate moves, his approach to public speaking. A lot of what we debate now is a reaction to his term in office.

**Isabelle Lee** (3:58)
Even the phrase, irrational exuberance, is something that he coined and I still hear that decades after.

**James Egelhof** (4:04)
Well, it's because Alan Greenspan led the economy through the 90s, through the last time we had a very exuberant tech boom. So some of these historical echoes we hear today, Alan Greenspan, for example, cut rates three times after the failure of long-term capital in 1998, which we think Jay Powell lifted from very, very liberally last year when he cut rates after tariffs. And so now, it's a lot of debate now about whether new Chair Warsh will have to lift a page from Alan Greenspan's playbook in 1999 when he took those insurance cuts back.