For all his reputation as a monetary magician, the exit of Alan Greenspan Tuesday from the global financial stage calls attention to a deceptively simple fact: He is replaceable.

It's true that Mr. Greenspan achieved the rare status of a Washington oracle, with policymakers and global investors hanging on each of his carefully intoned pronouncements. And although he has his share of critics, his record as Federal Reserve Chairman has elicited not merely praise but awe.

Yet Greenspan's legacy after nearly two decades goes well beyond his skill in statistics or his personal influence.

Under his leadership, the Fed has built up a reservoir of public confidence - effectively a vault full of credibility on which it can draw in future battles against inflation. Equally important, the Greenspan years were part of a broader trend toward improved monetary policy that goes beyond the man himself.

"It's a worldwide shift," says Alan Blinder, a Princeton University economist and a former Fed vice chairman. "It started before Greenspan, it was furthered by Greenspan, and it will continue after."

In many ways, this was not merely the Greenspan era but the era of the central banker. The furrow-browed "maestro" was cast in the lead role, and his performance made him an icon.

Yet the vanquishing of inflation during the past two decades was a worldwide trend. The progress stemmed in part from benign forces beyond any official's control, such as generally low oil prices. But a vital factor, economists say, was also better policy.

Increasingly, the job of central banker has become a post for professional economists, not former bankers or businessmen. And those economists "no longer divide at all along party lines on monetary policy," Dr. Blinder says.

A consensus now exists on many elements of monetary policy - the role that central banks can play by supplying more or less money to the economy.

The convergence has been bolstered not just by academic theory but by practical experience - notably that of Greenspan's predecessor, Paul Volcker.

Among the basic points:

• Monetary policy can defeat inflation. In the 1970s, policymakers and the public saw that controls on wages and prices failed to curb inflation. But when Chairman Volcker squeezed the money supply in the 1980s, prices finally stabilized.

• Expectations matter. If people don't believe the Fed will maintain a stable price level, they'll inadvertently fuel inflation by acting on those expectations. This made Volcker's job much tougher, and served as a reminder that maintaining credibility is half the Fed's battle.

• Price stability is Job 1. Congress has given the Fed a mandate to seek both stable prices and full employment. In the long run, those goals don't conflict. But in the short run, they can. Volcker's war on inflation cost many their jobs, but the economy finally returned to solid footing.

"The way to get higher growth is to have lower inflation," says Allan Meltzer, an economist and a historian of the Fed at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. "The success of the Fed and the Bank of England has done much to convince people that that's the way to go."

Debates remain about many issues in monetary policy, but this larger unity is significant.

"There's a much broader consensus about the importance of keeping one's eyes on the longer-term objectives ... keeping inflation low," says Carl Walsh, an economist at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Greenspan, he says, helped cement the Fed's reputation for delivering a degree of price stability.

Once a central bank has credibility on that front, he adds, it gains more freedom to adapt as needed to temporary shocks.

The Fed was able to ease its policy, for example, to calm world markets after the combination of a Russian debt default and a giant hedge-fund collapse in 1998. No one worried that Greenspan was going soft on inflation.

Greenspan departs the Fed after Tuesday's policy meeting to launch a consulting business. He leaves behind an enviable record that includes only two brief recessions (in 1990-91 and 2001) during a tenure that lasted from August 1987 through Tuesday.

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