Alan Greenspan, Fed chair under 4 U.S. presidents, dies at age 100

Alan Greenspan, an economist who served as chairman of the Federal Reserve under four U.S. presidents, died on Monday, his wife Andrea Mitchell said. He was 100. Greenspan died at his home due to complications of Parkinson's Disease, Mitchell said in a statement reported by NBC News, where she is the chief Washington and foreign affairs correspondent. As one of the longest-serving Federal Reserve chairs in U.S. history, Greenspan's reign at the central bank coincided with the so-called Great Moderation , a period of stability from the mid-1980s until 2007 that was marked by low inflation, stock market gains and strong economic growth. At the same time, his tenure was punctuated by several financial crises, ranging from the 1987 stock market crash to the bursting of the dot-com bubble in the early 2000s. In 1996, Greenspan famously coined the phrase "irrational exuberance" to describe bubbles fueled by unbridled investor optimism, alluding to that era's craze for internet company stocks. More controversially, Greenspan's legacy is linked to the 2008 global financial crisis and the ensuing Great Recession , although the economic collapse occurred after he ended his final term as Fed chair in early 2006. Yet some critics pointed to his "loose money" policies in the preceding years as contributing to the subprime housing crisis that ultimately caused the greatest U.S. economic collapse since the Great Depression. …