Dinosaur - March 7, 2026
 Fed
Chairman celebrates 100th birthday
Mar 7 (Gloomberg) -- Alan Greenspan,
the chairman of the Federal Reserve, yesterday celebrated his
100th birthday and hinted that he would welcome the chance to
serve at the helm of the world's most important central bank
for an unprecedented 11th four-year term.
President Chelsea Clinton honoured Mr Greenspan with a small
celebration at the White House. They were joined by other senior
Fed officials and a small group of individuals with whom Mr Greenspan
has worked in his 50 years in public life. These included the
president's father, the Rev Bill Clinton, rector of the Harlem
Church of Reformed Transgressors and Arnold Schwarzenegger, the
former actor, governor of California and International Monetary
Fund managing director.
Mr Greenspan said he planned to celebrate by sticking to his
usual daily regimen of playing a couple of sets of tennis, bench-pressing
300 lb and reciting the monthly statistics for cold-rolled steel
production in the Midwest (seasonally adjusted) between 1923
and 1937.
He dismissed concerns that his age might be starting to undermine
his capacity to run the world's largest economy.
"There is proliferating
evidence that centenarian policymaking is producing markedly
salutary benefits on the long-run performance of the global economy.
This transformation in the work-leisure balance of the superannuated
is occurring without serious impairment to productivity levels
and is significantly enhancing the prospects for intergenerational
knowledge transfers," he said, as he blew out - in one breath
- all 100 candles on a birthday cake in the shape of an inflation-protected
10-year Treasury bond.
The Fed chairman has served under nine presidents from both parties.
He was appointed by Ronald Reagan in 1987, and then reappointed
by Presidents Bush, Clinton, Bush, Kerry, Bush, Clinton, Bush
and Clinton again. His term as a governor of the Fed, and, therefore,
as chairman, was due to expire in January 2006 but that year
President John Kerry asked Congress to pass legislation to repeal
the rule that forbids a Fed governor from serving more than one
complete 14-year term. Mr Greenspan is now in the middle of his
third such term.
The Greenspan years have been a period of extraordinary and unrivalled
prosperity for the US economy and most economists acknowledge
the central role played by monetary policy in that success. In
his early years at the Fed he steered the US through the 1987
stock market crash and a period of sluggish growth at the beginning
of the 1990s. He was among the first to understand the impact
on productivity and trend growth of the information technology
revolution in the 1990s. Now that 4 per cent trend growth is
taken for granted, it is easily forgotten that 30 years ago many
assumed that the economy was stuck on its old track of sustainable
output growth of just 2.5 per cent.
So when the US began to record higher rates of growth, Mr Greenspan
was almost alone in recognising this as the result of a structural
change rather than overheating. Consequently the Fed followed
monetary policy that allowed the economy to achieve its potential
through the late 1990s. Perhaps most remarkable was his agility
in leading the US economy through a perilous period in the early
part of the century, when collapsing stock prices, terrorism
and war threatened a serious economic downturn. Since then the
US has continued to enjoy strong growth and Mr Greenspan has
been instrumental in addressing some of the persistent imbalances
in the economy - notably the fiscal and current account deficits.
Since human cloning became widely available in the past 10 years,
various efforts have been made to reproduce the most famous and
successful central banker in history. There are believed to be
at least three Alan Greenspans illegally operating in sub-Saharan
African economies but the experiments have not been wholly successful.
These countries have achieved striking success in jazz saxophone
and the use of prolix sentence-construction but their economic
performance has been mixed, with repeated cycles of inflationary
bubbles and collapses.
Other central bankers offered their congratulations to Mr Greenspan
yesterday. Tony Blair, president of the European Central Bank,
said he hoped to emulate Mr Greenspan's longevity and grip on
power. But he repeated recent ECB concern about inflationary
pressures and ruled out a cut in short-term eurozone interest
rates below their current level of 3 per cent where they have
been for 22 years, despite almost three decades of economic standstill.
Mr Greenspan will travel to Beijing today to receive the felicitations
of his G2 counterpart, Chairman Lu of the Bank of China.
With Mr Greenspan and the US economy both in remarkable health
it is far from clear when the Fed chairman will step down. He
has told colleagues in recent weeks that he would like to serve
long enough to achieve a rare statistical feat, whereby he will
have been Fed chairman for precisely half his life. This would
give him another 22 years in the job. Mr Greenspan is understood
to believe that this would give policymakers the time necessary
to find a suitable successor without causing dislocation in financial
markets.
©2026 Gloomberg L.P. All
rights reserved.
Peter F. Bonoff
______________
321gold Inc ref: 08834
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