During his 2008 presidential campaign, John McCain joked that he would put Alan Greenspan in charge of tax policy even if the recently retired central banker were deceased. “If he’s alive or dead it doesn’t matter. If he’s dead, just prop him up and put some dark glasses on him, like Weekend at Bernie’s.”

McCain’s timing, as always, was terrible. The quip about Greenspan was made in October of 2007, as the housing market collapse that would trigger the Great Recession was accelerating. This collapse would drastically reshape Greenspan’s reputation. For the previous two decades, when he served as chair of the Federal Reserve, Greenspan’s piloting of the American economy won him endless encomia. In the aftermath of the crisis, however, Greenspan would be forced to confess that he found a “flaw” in the model of free-market economics through which he had made policy.

With Greenspan’s death at age one hundred on June 22, attention has returned to Greenspan’s role in shaping modern capitalism. His acknowledgment of a flaw in his ideology, made in testimony before Congress in October of 2008, serves as a handy tentpole for retrospectives on his career, contrasting his dogmatic faith in free markets with the messier economic reality.