The legend comes to an end as centenarian “dollar helmsman” Greenspan passes away!

According to U.S. media on June 22, the former Chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan, passed away that day at the age of 100. The announcement was confirmed in a statement released by his wife, NBC veteran reporter Andrea Mitchell. The elderly man completed his 100-year journey at home due to complications from Parkinson’s disease.

Born in 1926 in New York, Greenspan is a figure in global financial history that is highly controversial yet impossible to bypass. He served as Chair of the Federal Reserve from 1987 to 2006 for a total of 18 and a half years, spanning four U.S. presidents—Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Clinton, and George W. Bush—making him the longest-serving Federal Reserve Chairman in U.S. history.

During his tenure, he flexibly adjusted interest rates and smoothly weathered multiple crises such as the U.S. stock market crash, the Asian financial storm, and the internet bubble, giving rise to a prolonged cycle of extraordinary economic prosperity in the United States. At one point, the market regarded him as a “financial sage,” and people in the know also joked that he was the “Dollar President”; a single sentence could stir global stock and currency market trends.

But later assessments have been sharply divided: while his loose, low-interest policies boosted growth, academics also criticized them for inflating the real estate bubble, planting the seeds of the subsequent subprime mortgage crisis. In his later years, he also calmly reviewed the gains and losses of his past policies, never shying away from his own judgment errors.

From a saxophonist to an economist who holds the pulse of global money, Greenspan’s century-long life almost encapsulates the rise and fall of the global dollar system over the past several decades. Now, the era-ending figure who shaped the direction of the world economy has passed away—an official end, too, to memories of the age of loose monetary policy and a golden era.

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