Alan Greenspan died this week at 100, and the tributes are pouring in. Maestro. Genius. The man who steered the American economy for two decades.
I’m going to give you a different view, because I lived through his record as an investor, not a fan.
First, his respect is due. Greenspan ran the Federal Reserve from 1987 to 2006, longer than almost anyone, under four presidents. The economy grew on his watch. The Dow went from under 2,000 when he took over to above 12,000 when he left.
By any simple scoreboard, that’s a long stretch of prosperity, and he deserves credit for steady hands in a few real panics.
But a scoreboard doesn’t tell the whole story.
Greenspan was a true believer.
A student of Ayn Rand, a libertarian to his core, a man who trusted free markets, deregulation, and sound money the way other people trust gravity. He genuinely believed that markets, left alone, would police themselves.
He believed that money-hungry, profit-chasing banks would never take on risks that could blow up the whole system, because it was not in their interest to do so.
That belief was the problem.
Look at what actually happened across those two decades. There were two major crashes on his watch, the 1987 collapse just two months into the job and the dot-com implosion in 2000.
And then he walked out the door in early 2006, right before the biggest crash of all arrived.
The volatility was not a side effect. It was baked into a system he kept loosening.
His fingerprints are all over the worst of it. The push to deregulate, including the dismantling of the Glass-Steagall protections that had kept everyday banking separate from Wall Street risk-taking, helped open the door to the excesses that detonated in 2008.
Cheap money, light-touch oversight, and a deep faith that the banks knew what they were doing. That was the recipe.
And here’s the part the tributes skip.
After the 2008 meltdown, Greenspan sat in front of Congress and admitted it. He said he had found a “flaw” in his own ideology. His lifelong faith that markets would self-correct, that the banks would never act against their own survival, had failed.
He was, in his words, in a state of shocked disbelief.
He tried to defend himself later, and even his defense gives the game away.
He claimed he’d been right about 70% of the time while in office.
Sit with that number for a second. The most powerful economic policymaker on earth, the man whose every word moved markets, was telling you he got it wrong nearly a third of the time, on the decisions that shaped the savings of an entire country.
I do not write this to dance on a man’s grave. He was brilliant, and he served his country for a long time.
I write it because there’s a lesson in it worth more than any eulogy.
The smartest person in the room, running the most powerful financial institution on earth, got the single most important thing wrong. He assumed the system would protect itself.
It did not, and millions of ordinary people, here and around the world, paid the price for that assumption with their homes and their savings.
So, when you hear that the market always works itself out, that the people in charge have it handled, that this time the risk is contained, remember Greenspan.
Remember that he believed all of that too, with more conviction and more credentials than anyone. And remember that he was wrong almost a third of the time by his own count.
YOUR ACTION PLAN
Greenspan didn’t fail because he was stupid. He failed because he outsourced the hardest job in investing, managing risk, to an institution he trusted too much.
Don’t make the same mistake with your money.
The Fed won’t protect your portfolio. The banks won’t protect it. The next “genius” running monetary policy won’t protect it.
That’s your job, and it always has been.
That’s exactly why Bryan and I built The War Room. It’s for investors who want to stay one step ahead of the system rather than one behind it.