Commentary
Alan Greenspan is dead at one hundred years old, and the Federal Reserve has declared that he helped establish the credibility that remains one of its most important assets. That is a measured tribute from a measured institution, and it is not wrong. But credibility is a strange monument for a republic to erect over any man’s grave, because credibility is not a fixed inheritance — it is a living demand, renewed each generation by the quality of those who hold the levers of public power. The question Greenspan’s passing should force upon us is not whether he was consequential, but whether the institutions he shaped are still worthy of the confidence the republic places in them.
Five terms. Four presidents. Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush — men of radically different temperaments and parties, spanning nearly two decades of American life. For the Federal Reserve to retain its chair across that span of political weather is itself a civic fact worth examining. On one reading it is a testament to genuine institutional independence, the kind of structural separation from electoral passion that the framers understood was necessary for durable governance. On another reading it invites the uncomfortable question of whether any single man, however talented, ought to accumulate that much influence over the economic life of a nation for that long. Republics are not well served by irreplaceable men. They are well served by strong institutions that make any given man replaceable.
Greenspan navigated monetary policy during years of genuine turbulence — the crashes, the booms, the long expansions that made Americans feel, at various moments, as though the business cycle had been tamed. The central bank’s own statement honors him for the credibility he helped build. That credibility was real and it mattered. An institution without credibility cannot function, and a republic whose core institutions cannot function does not long remain a republic. Give Greenspan that. The man worked, and he worked at a level of complexity that this column, which reaches for muscle where technical finance needs precision, will not pretend to referee in its particulars.
But here is the civic argument that Greenspan’s death properly occasions, stripped of the monetary minutiae. Institutional credibility is not self-sustaining. It is built up through decades of demonstrated competence and independence, and it can be spent faster than it was earned. The Federal Reserve’s statement says that credibility remains one of its most important assets — present tense, which is the right tense. The inheritance exists. The obligation now falls on those who hold the institution today. A legacy is not an endowment that earns interest while its beneficiaries sleep. It is a standard, and standards are either met or they are abandoned, and abandonment always announces itself quietly, with small compromises, before it becomes visible catastrophe.
There is a wider point here about the constitutional architecture of American governance, and it deserves plain statement. We build institutions with independent mandates because we have learned, from bitter experience and from the studied wisdom of those who designed this republic, that power concentrated in transient political hands produces transient and often ruinous decisions. The Fed’s independence from the electoral cycle is not an aristocratic arrangement. It is a republican one, designed to protect long-term national interests from short-term political temptation. Greenspan’s ability to serve across four administrations was, in its structure if not always in its particulars, an expression of that design working as intended. Whether the design continues to work as intended is a question every generation of Americans must answer freshly, with vigilance rather than comfort.
A man who lives to one hundred and spends the better part of two decades shaping the financial architecture of the most powerful nation on earth has earned a respectful hearing at his death. Greenspan gets that from this corner without reservation. But respect for the man cannot be permitted to calcify into uncritical reverence for every arrangement he embodied. The republic is not well served by nostalgia that substitutes the memory of competent stewardship for the hard work of demanding it in the present. The Federal Reserve’s credibility is real. It is also mortal. It requires tending. And the generation now holding these institutions owes the nation exactly what Greenspan owed it when he first took the chair: not comfort, not deference to inherited prestige, but honest, rigorous, independent judgment pressed into the service of the public good.
One hundred years is a long life. The institutions of a republic are supposed to last longer. Honor the man, by all means. Then get back to work making sure what he helped build does not become a relic that outlives its own vitality. That is the only tribute that matters.