Former US Federal Reserve chair Alan Greenspan due to complications from Parkinson’s disease, his family said on Monday. He was 100.

Greenspan was chief of the Federal Reserve for nearly 19 years from 1987 until 2006, overseeing an economic boom from the final years of the Cold War through to the Dot-com Bubble of 2001.

But critics have argued that his leadership created the conditions for the Global Financial Crisis in 2008.

"He was a giant of a man who helped shape the US economy for decades under presidents of both parties, but was always honest in acknowledging his mistakes," his wife, NBC News correspondent Andrea Mitchell, told the broadcaster in a statement.

"To me, he was my husband, who shaped my life from our very first date in 1984. He had ‘irrational exuberance' for baseball, the Washington Commanders, tennis, golf and music, especially jazz."

In a statement, the Fed expressed its "deep sadness" at Greenspan's passing and lauded his "monetary policy and economic thought."

"Under his leadership, the Federal Reserve achieved a sustained era of price stability that supported economic growth and helped anchor the public's confidence in the institution," the Fed said.

'The oracle' with a controversial legacy

When he stepped down in 2006, Greenspan was known as "a maestro" and "the oracle" for overseeing the second-longest period of economic expansion in US history.

He earned rockstar status for his decision not to raise intrest rates in the face of an inflation threat, judging that a productivity surge in the mid-1990s would instead keep inflation in check.

But he left a complex legacy.

Greenspan had a "legitimate claim to being the greatest central banker who ever lived," Alan Blinder, a Princeton economics professor who served as Fed vice chair, told the AFP new agency.

However, Greeenspan's "excessive reliance on the self-regulating aspects of markets seemed dangerously naive, and eventually blew up in his face and everybody's face," Binder added.

Banks came to rely on the so-called "Greenspan put" — the Fed's tendency to cut rates or provide liquidity whenever banks were in trouble. This, combined with Greenspan's belief in light financial supervision, was blamed for the 2007 subprime mortgage crisis and the Global Financial Crisis that followed in 2008.

It culminated in the worst recession since the 1930s and saw millions of Americans have their homes foreclosed. Greenspan would late acknowledge that he made a "mistake" in assuming the nation's banks could essentially regulate themselves.

"I think the deification that came just before the financial crisis was never really deserved, and I think the lambasting that he took after he left was never fully deserved either," Stephen Oliner, a former senior official at the Fed, told Reuters.

After leaving the Fed, Greenspan led his own consulting firm in Washington and also served as an adviser to major financial firms, including Deutsche Bank.

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Edited by Richard Connor