Alan Greenspan, who served as chair of the Federal Reserve for nearly two decades, died at the age of 100 on Monday.

The renowned economist, who was first nominated to lead the Fed by President Ronald Reagan in 1987, died from complications of Parkinson’s disease, his wife, Andrea Mitchell, a veteran NBC News journalist and former MSNBC host, said in a statement.

“He was a giant of a man who helped shape the U.S. economy for decades under presidents of both parties but was always honest in acknowledging his mistake,” Mitchell said in her statement.

“To me he was my husband, who shaped my life from our very first date in 1984,” she continued. “He had ‘irrational exuberance’ for baseball, the Washington Commanders, tennis, golf, and music, especially jazz. He will be remembered for his brilliance and his kindness. Being his life partner was the joy of my life.”

Greenspan served as the head of the United States’ central bank for five terms from 1987 until he retired in 2006 after working under four presidents: Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. He has the second-longest tenure in the role, behind William McChesney Martin Jr., who served from 1951 to 1970.

Previously, he served as chairman of President Gerald R. Ford’s Council of Economic Advisers and later led the 1983 National Commission on Social Security Reform. George W. Bush awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2005.

According to an obituary shared by his family, Greenspan received honorary degrees from Harvard, Yale, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Edinburgh, New York University, Notre Dame, Boston College and Wake Forest University.

“Rejected for military service as medically unfit in 1944, he studied clarinet at the Juilliard School, and played clarinet and tenor saxophone professionally in the Henry Jerome Orchestra, traveling across the country with fellow sax player Stan Getz,” the obituary provided by his family stated. “He earned his BA, master’s and Ph.D. from New York University. Greenspan also did advanced economic studies at Columbia University but left to join the Wall Street firm of Townsend- Greenspan and Co., Inc. which he led as Chairman and President until undertaking his position at the Fed.”

Greenspan was so respected during his many years as head of the world’s most influential central bank that by the time he stepped down in 2006, he was widely celebrated as the “Oracle” and “Maestro.”

Greenspan’s reputation suffered a serious setback, however, when the American housing market collapsed, igniting a global financial crisis that nearly toppled the U.S. banking system and plunged the economy into the worst recession since the 1930s. Critics pinned much of the blame for the crisis on Greenspan’s easy-money policies and on what they believed was an overexuberant faith in lightly supervised financial markets.

Greenspan himself later acknowledged “I made a mistake” in assuming the nation’s banks, the stability of which undergirds the financial system and the entire economy, could essentially regulate themselves.

In his more than 18 years at the Fed, Greenspan presided over a breathtaking surge in stock prices and a 10-year economic boom that began in March 1991. He was widely celebrated as a virtuoso who nurtured America’s economic well-being and whose nearly every utterance was parsed for clues as to where interest rates, the economy and the financial markets might be headed.

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