Alan Greenspan, the legendary former Federal Reserve chair, dies

Former Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan delivers the keynote address at the IMF Statistical Forum/Statistics for Policy Making in Washington, D.C., on Nov. 18, 2014. Greenspan died on Monday at age 100. Paul J. Richards/AFP via Getty Images hide caption toggle caption Paul J. Richards/AFP via Getty Images Former Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan delivers the keynote address at the IMF Statistical Forum/Statistics for Policy Making in Washington, D.C., on Nov. 18, 2014. Greenspan died on Monday at age 100. Paul J. Richards/AFP via Getty Images Alan Greenspan, who steered the Federal Reserve for nearly two decades, through some of the longest economic booms in U.S. history, has died. Greenspan died Monday at his home in Washington. He was 100. Greenspan was the rare celebrity among central bankers, lionized for his economic stewardship in the 1990s. At a time when it seemed every barbershop had a television tuned to the stock market channel, ordinary Americans hung on the Fed chairman's every word. His reputation was tarnished, however, by the global financial crisis which struck a decade later. Greenspan liked to write speeches in the bathtub, but it was his listeners who were sometimes left feeling underwater by the unfamiliar dialect known as "Fedspeak." Greenspan later acknowledged that he would deliberately garble his syntax to avoid saying anything that might move financial markets. …