Alan Greenspan, the former Federal Reserve chairman whose nearly two-decade tenure defined a generation of US monetary policy, died on Monday at the age of 100.

Key Highlights

  • Greenspan served as Fed chairman from 1987 to 2006, overseeing the longest peacetime US economic expansion.
  • His death coincides with a sharp philosophical reversal at the Fed under Kevin Warsh, who has rejected the Greenspan put.
  • At least two major institutional research desks now project a September rate increase under the new hawkish leadership.

Greenspan's tenure spanned the Black Monday crash, the dot-com bubble, and the post-September 11 economic shock, with each episode met by monetary accommodation that reinforced markets' expectation of a central bank backstop. Critics later argued this posture allowed systemic leverage and asset price inflation to accumulate unchecked, contributing to conditions that preceded the 2008 financial crisis.

His death arrives as Kevin Warsh, appointed Fed chair in May 2026, is reversing those frameworks with a deliberate focus on price discipline over growth management. Warsh's hawkish signalling has already contributed to a repricing of longer-duration Treasuries and a broad selloff in megacap technology equities sensitive to higher discount rates.

Trading desks are treating the Greenspan retrospective not as nostalgia but as a reference point for what is now being dismantled. The shift from reflexive accommodation to inflation discipline is beginning to compress risk asset multiples and unwind the passive leverage accumulated during the era of near-zero real rates.