Alan Greenspan, the Federal Reserve’s long-standing money printer-in-chief, has finally kicked the bucket at the ripe old age of 100. For nearly two decades, Greenspan was the undisputed king of the global financial system, setting interest rates and telling banks how to behave while the entire political and financial establishment treated him like a literal deity. But while the elites spent decades acting like he was an economic wizard, his legacy ended up getting a massive downgrade when the housing bubble popped in 2008 and blew up the entire global economy.

Long before he was dictating the flow of trillions of dollars, Greenspan started out his adult life playing the saxophone and clarinet in a New York swing band. Talk about a pivot. He traded the jazz clubs for the Fed, taking over as Chairman in 1987 and becoming one of the most powerful people on the planet. For nineteen years, Greenspan was the guy pullin' the levers of the US economy, serving under four different presidents—Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush. Despite being a lifelong Republican, he was more than happy to play ball with whoever was occupying the Oval Office.

During his glory days, the media and the political class couldn't stop sucking up to him. They gave him cringe-tier nicknames like "the Oracle," "the Wizard," and "the Maestro." Every time the market sneezed, Greenspan would swoop in with some interest rate cuts, supposedly "saving" us from the 1987 Black Monday crash, the 1997 Asian financial crisis, and the post-9/11 panic. The elites loved it because it kept the cheap money flowing and the party going, while the mainstream media clapped along like seals.

His crown jewel was the massive economic boom of 1991 to 2001, which had everyone in Washington convinced that Greenspan had solved economics forever. In his 2000 biography, journalist Justin Martin wrote that by the turn of the millennium, "it was nearly impossible to find anyone in America who was not gaga over Greenspan." Democrats, Republicans, Wall Street, Main Street—hell, Martin even joked that dogs and cats were high on the Fed chairman. It was a giant, bipartisan circle-jerk of epic proportions, and everyone thought the good times would never end.

Spoiler alert: they did. All that cheap credit, financial deregulation, and hands-off oversight was actually just building a giant house of cards. Although Greenspan managed to escape to retirement in 2006, the entire sub-prime mortgage crisis, the complex derivatives, and the housing bubble happened entirely on his watch. When the whole system crashed in 2008, the world realized that "the Maestro" had basically been asleep at the wheel while Wall Street ran wild.