R.I.P. Alan Greenspan: You were charming, thoughtful, powerful, and wrong

His insistence on financial deregulation brought the economy to its knees

Friends,

Alan Greenspan has died at the age of 100.

My students don’t recognize his name, but you probably do. When he was chairman of the Federal Reserve — for more than 18 years, from August 11, 1987 to January 31, 2006 — he not only ran the U.S. economy (and most of the world’s) but was also in many ways the most powerful person in America.

He maintai…