Alan Greenspan Bio ~ the first part of our series

We begin our series on Alan Greenspan with a short bio.

Greenspan was born in 1926 to a Hungarian Jewish family in the Washington Heights area of New York City. He attended The Juilliard School from 1943 to 1944. He then attended New York University (NYU), and received a B.S. in Economics (summa cum laude) in 1948, and a M.A in Economics in 1950. Greenspan went on to Columbia University but subsequently dropped out. At Columbia, Greenspan studied economics under the mentorship of former Fed chairman Arthur Burns (who constantly warned of the dangers of inflation). Many years later, in 1977, NYU awarded him a Ph.D. in Economics. There is some dispute as to whether he wrote a dissertation, normally required for that degree (it appears that he did not). On December 14, 2005, he was awarded an honorary Doctor of Commercial Science from NYU, his fourth degree from that institution.

From 1948 to 1953, Greenspan worked as an economic analyst at The Conference Board, a business and industry oriented think-tank in New York City. From 1955 to 1987, Greenspan was Chairman and President of Townsend-Greenspan & Co., Inc., an economic consulting firm in New York City. He had a brief interruption from 1974 to 1977 by his service as Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Gerald Ford. In 1968, Richard Nixon asked Greenspan to serve as his coordinator on domestic policy in the nomination campaign and Greenspan agreed. Greenspan also has served as a corporate director for Aluminum Company of America (Alcoa); Automatic Data Processing, Inc.; Capital Cities/ABC, Inc.; General Foods, Inc.; J.P. Morgan & Co., Inc.; Morgan Guaranty Trust Company of New York; Mobil Corporation; and The Pittston Company. He also served as a member of the influential Washington-based financial advisory body, the Group of Thirty in 1984. In 1987 he was appointed as Chairman of the Federal Reserve.

Alan Greenspan has been married twice. His first marriage was to Joan Mitchell in 1952; the marriage ended in divorce one year later in 1953. In 1984, Greenspan began dating journalist Andrea Mitchell. In 1997, they were married by Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Source: Wikipedia