On Monday, Alan Greenspan died at the age of 100. The Federal Reserve, which he led from 1987 until 2006, issued an encomium in characteristically modest and understated Fedspeak. Greenspan guided the economy through periods of “significant economic expansion” and “considerable stress.” On his watch, the American central bank realized “a sustained era of price stability,” helping to “anchor the public’s confidence in the institution.”

Of Greenspan’s achievements, that last one seems the most remarkable and most important. The country is in a grandly anti-institutional era. Americans have given up on the Supreme Court, colleges and universities, Congress, the media, science and traditional medicine, established political parties, and longtime politicians. The man who currently sits behind the Resolute Desk, a barnstorming outsider with zero public-service experience, is a beneficiary of this populist sentiment as well as a driver of it. He has installed policy novices in positions of extraordinary power, naming his personal lawyer as attorney general, a construction executive as housing-finance chief, an environmental activist as the overseer of public-health programs, a former congressional representative as intelligence czar, and a co-founder of a wrestling federation as the secretary of education.

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The Fed has not avoided the collapse in public trust that other institutions are experiencing. Still, it remains professional and independent, as so many other pillars of American life have bowed and bent. The markets trust it. Banks trust it. Foreign governments trust it. Congress trusts it. Greenspan helped develop that trust. The great risk now is that Washington might destroy it.

A Reagan appointee, Greenspan started his tenure at the Fed with a crisis. Just a few weeks after he took control, the markets notched their worst day in recorded history, as equity prices plunged more than 20 percent. In response to Black Monday, Greenspan put out a single-sentence statement: “The Federal Reserve, consistent with its responsibilities as the Nation’s central bank, affirmed today its readiness to serve as a source of liquidity to support the economic and financial system.” He set secret contingency plans in motion. He ensured that banks could keep lending. The markets calmed down.

In the coming years, the “Maestro,” or “Saint Alan” as he also came to be known, staked out the Fed as a commanding technocracy, unwilling to cede to political pressure, the public’s whims, or bankers’ demands. He emphasized that it was his job to “take away the punch bowl just as the party gets going,” as his predecessor William McChesney Martin had argued in 1955. And he did. George H. W. Bush openly pressured Greenspan to drop interest rates in response to the 1990 recession, borne of the savings-and-loan crisis and an oil shock. Greenspan and the Federal Open Markets Committee kept them higher than Bush would have liked, to avoid destabilizing price increases. Later, Greenspan shrugged off calls to raise borrowing costs, arguing that the computing revolution’s productivity gains were powering the country’s strong growth.

Thanks in part to Greenspan’s stewardship, the United States enjoyed a “great moderation,” a long period of stable expansion. It bounced back from the dot-com bubble. It weathered the Asian financial crisis. The middle class grew. The stock market boomed. The central banker developed an otherworldly reputation—encouraged it, even. He talked the market up and down in Fedspeak, modest and understated and pointedly unscrutable. When asked a question by a member of Congress, “I would engage in some form of syntax destruction,” he later explained, a tactic that allowed him to say something and nothing at the same time. The unemployment rate, Paul Krugman wrote in the late ’90s, “will be what Greenspan wants it to be, plus or minus a random error reflecting the fact that he is not quite God.”

Greenspan left the Fed in 2006. Shortly after, his successor, Ben Bernanke, faced a crisis of his own: the collapse of the real-estate market, a financial panic, a recession unlike any the world had seen in the better part of a century. Greenspan had believed in lightly regulated markets, trusting that financial firms were in the business of pricing risk and correcting excesses. But in this case, they had not. “Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholders’ equity, myself especially, are in a state of shocked disbelief,” he told the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform after Lehman Brothers collapsed. His actions contributed to financial carnage, a reality he never fully wrestled with.

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Bernanke’s Fed responded to the 2008 financial panic with extraordinary ingenuity, preventing the banking system from seizing and jolting the economy back into growth. When COVID hit, the Fed, then under Jerome Powell, rushed in again to calm the markets. Still, the Great Recession fueled Americans’ anti-institutional sentiment and stoked a widespread collapse in public trust, made worse by the pandemic and worse again by soaring inflation, which the Fed failed to prevent. Financiers, Wall Street CEOs, C-suite executives, and asset-rich millionaires have done great since the end of Greenspan’s tenure. Everyday Americans have endured two mass-unemployment events and a cost-of-living crisis.

Americans don’t trust experienced technocrats anymore—and Donald Trump doesn’t want them to, because he sees dedicated civil servants as obstacles to his political will. I can’t imagine another not-quite-God-type figure running the Fed in the coming years, simply because I cannot imagine another person developing his not-quite-God-type reputation in such a fractious, populist era. I can, however, imagine a bunch of partisan amateurs taking control of America’s monetary policy.