http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/26/business/26fed.html?_r=1&pagewanted=allBut even as Mr. Greenspan was being celebrated as the economy's "maestro," he sounded far less omniscient behind closed doors.
"We really do not know how this system works," he told members of the Fed's policy-making committee in Washington, according to transcripts released earlier this year. "It's clearly new. The old models just are not working."
Now, as he nears the end of his 18-year tenure in the job, Mr. Greenspan is leaving a brilliant record but a murky legacy.
Despite numerous economic shocks and financial excesses, unemployment and inflation are both lower now than many economists considered possible when Mr. Greenspan took office in 1987. But whoever moves into his spacious office on Constitution Avenue early next year faces a near-impossible task in replicating Mr. Greenspan's success in managing monetary policy.
That is because Mr. Greenspan abhorred rules, was skeptical about economic models and jettisoned practices that were enshrined by the likes of Paul A. Volcker, his predecessor, and Milton Friedman, a winner of the Nobel in economic science. If Mr. Greenspan stood for anything, it was flexibility and the freedom from dogma.
"The Greenspan standard has for the most part meant what Greenspan wanted to do," said Alan S. Blinder, a professor of economics at Princeton and a former vice chairman of the Federal Reserve.
Mr. Blinder will be one of many economists at a Federal Reserve symposium beginning here Friday that will be devoted to discussions about the "post-Greenspan era." Before that, however, the gathering will open with what is expected to be Mr. Greenspan's swan song speech as chairman of the Fed.
Mr. Greenspan, whose term as a Fed governor expires in January and cannot be renewed, is thought likely to devote his speech to the lessons he learned running the central bank longer than all but one of his predecessors, William McChesney Martin Jr. Expected to be listening particularly closely at the conference are three of the leading candidates to succeed him: Ben S. Bernanke, President Bush's chief economic adviser; Martin S. Feldstein, an economist at Harvard; and R. Glenn Hubbard of Columbia University.
But for all his triumphs, Mr. Greenspan also presided over a stock market bubble that burst and, in helping minimize the damage from that fiasco, laid the groundwork for the housing boom - and potential bust - that followed.
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At 78, his hair is thinning and his gait is becoming stiffer. But he may be as famous as any pop star; he is certainly a larger-than-life figure for political leaders and economists. At a hearing in July before the House Financial Services Committee, lawmakers from both parties showered him with so much praise that they began running out of accolades.
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