Let’s keep it a hundred: Alan Greenspan, the guy who ran the Federal Reserve and basically controlled the whole money game for nearly twenty years, just passed away at the age of 100. If you don't know who he is, he was the ultimate puppet master of the US economy, the dude setting the interest rates and keeping the banks in line from 1987 to 2006. For a long time, the suits on Wall Street and the politicians in DC treated him like a straight-up economic god. But when the housing market collapsed in 2008, the whole world realized he blew the play and let the big banks run wild.

Greenspan didn't even start out in the suit-and-tie world. Back in the day, he was a young dude playing the saxophone and clarinet in a New York swing band. But he flipped the script, got into economics, and climbed his way up to becoming the head of the central bank. As the Fed Chairman, he became one of the most powerful people on the planet. He was running the game under four different presidents—Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush. Even though he was a lifelong Republican, he knew how to keep his spot at the table no matter who was in the White House.

During the 90s, everyone was riding his wave. The media and the big-money players were calling him "the Oracle," "the Wizard," and "the Maestro" because they thought he had the cheat code for the economy. Whenever the markets started tripping—like during the 1987 Black Monday crash, the 1997 Asian financial crisis, or right after the September 11 attacks in 2001—Greenspan would step in, make his moves, and get the money flowing again to restore confidence.

His biggest flex was presiding over one of the longest economic booms in US history, running from 1991 all the way to 2001. During those ten years, the country was getting money, and everyone thought Greenspan was the reason why. In his 2000 book, journalist Justin Martin wrote that by the start of the new millennium, you couldn't find anyone in America who wasn't "gaga over Greenspan." He said Democrats, Republicans, Wall Street, and Main Street—even the dogs and cats—were all high on the Fed chairman.

But here’s where the story goes left. All that hype was way too early. Just two years after Greenspan retired in 2006, the entire housing market blew up in 2008, causing the biggest economic crash since the Great Depression. Even though he had already stepped down, all the shady stuff that caused the crash—financial deregulation, reckless bankers, sub-prime mortgages, and cheap interest rates—happened while he was running the shop.