Alan Greenspan, the chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve during the 1987 stock market crash and the bursting of the dot-com bubble, said the United Kingdom’s vote to leave the European Union is worse than 1987 stock-market crash.

"There's nothing like it, including the crisis — remember October 19th, 1987, when the Dow went down by a record amount 23 percent? That I thought was the bottom of all potential problems. This has a corrosive effect that will not go away," he told CNBC.

U.K. voters approved the measure to exit the 28-country bloc by a vote of 51.9 percent, sparking worries that the European Union would dissolve under the weight of austerity measures, weak economic growth and an immigration crisis triggered by the civil war in Syria.

Stocks and currencies went into a tailspin with the British pound dropping more than 10 percent to a 30-year low, drastically cutting the spending power of U.K. residents. The S&P 500 index of U.S. stocks fell 2.6 percent Friday morning after the Brexit vote.

"Brexit is not the end of the set of problems, which I always thought were going to start with the euro because the euro is a very serious problem in that the southern part of the eurozone is being funded by the northern part and the European Central Bank," Greenspan said.

He said the ECB is limited in what it can do to reverse restraints on government spending and demographic forces that are weighing on the global economy, including the United States.

“There's a certain amount that monetary policy can do, but our problem is fundamentally fiscal," he said, “Developed countries are all aging very rapidly," which is leading to a higher ratio of government spending in the form of entitlements, he told the news network.

Last month, Greenspan warned that the global economy’s inability to produce goods and services efficiently is going to cripple the ability to pay for pensions and health programs for the elderly.

“We have a global problem of a shortage in productivity growth, and it is not only the United States but it is pretty much around the world,” he told Fox Business. “Populations everywhere in the western world, for example, are aging and we're not committing enough of our resources to fund that.”

Productivity, the measure of hourly output per worker, has declined as businesses have slowed their investment in plant and equipment to boost efficiency. Meanwhile, the massive increase in private and public sector debt that has helped to boost the economy in the past is now dragging on growth.

Greenspan says governments are going to confront another major financial crisis as economies struggle to pay for entitlement programs.

“Entitlements are crowding out savings and hence, capital investment. Capital investment is the critical issue in productivity growth and productivity growth in turn is the crucial issue in economic growth,” he says. “We're running at the end of this period to a state of disaster unless we turn it around."

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