Alan Greenspan was chairman of the Federal Reserve, and one of the most powerful financial men in America, from 1988 until his retirement in 2006. Greenspan had a brief fling as a professional jazz saxophonist before attending New York University and then joining an economics consulting firm in New York City in 1954. He advised presidents, Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford , and was named Chairman of the Board of Governors for the Federal Reserve System in 1987, a post he held under presidents Ronald Reagan, George Bush the elder, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush . As chairman, Greenspan was largely responsible for directing U.S. national monetary policy; he is often credited with keeping inflation at historically low levels, and sometimes criticized for the boom-and-bust nature of the economy in dot-com era. He stepped down from the post on 31 January 2006, and was succeeded by former Princeton econonomics department chair Ben Bernanke.