Alan Greenspan Was ‘Not Quite God’

On Monday, Alan Greenspan died at the age of 100. The Federal Reserve, which he led from 1987 until 2006, issued an encomium in characteristically modest and understated Fedspeak. Greenspan guided the economy through periods of “significant economic expansion” and “considerable stress.” On his watch, the American central bank realized “a sustained era of price stability,” helping to “anchor the public’s confidence in the institution.”Of Greenspan’s achievements, that last one seems the most remarkable and most important. The country is in a grandly anti-institutional era. Americans have given up on the Supreme Court, colleges and universities, Congress, the media, science and traditional medicine, established political parties, and longtime politicians. The man who currently sits behind the Resolute Desk, a barnstorming outsider with zero public-service experience, is a beneficiary of this populist sentiment as well as a driver of it. He has installed policy novices in positions of extraordinary power, naming his personal lawyer as attorney general, a construction executive as housing-finance chief, an environmental activist as the overseer of public-health programs, a former congressional representative as intelligence czar, and a co-founder of a wrestling federation as the secretary of education.[Rogé Karma: Trump’s Fed-chair pick is an interest-rate hawk—or is he?]The Fed has not avoided the collapse in public trust that other institutions are experiencing. Still, it remains professional and independent, as so many other pillars of American life have bowed and bent. The markets trust it. Banks trust it. Foreign governments trust it. Congress trusts it. Greenspan helped develop that trust. The great risk now is that Washington might destroy it.A Reagan appointee, Greenspan started his tenure at the Fed with a crisis. Just a few weeks after he took control, the markets notched their worst day in recorded history, as equity prices plunged more than 20 percent. In re