Top 100 Alan Greenspan Quotes
#1. Since 1948 I have spent every single day thinking how the economic and political worlds have changed.
Alan Greenspan
#2. We cannot rule out a situation in which a preemptive policy tightening becomes necessary, ... Such caution seems especially warranted with regard to the sharp rise in equity prices during the past two years. These gains have obviously raised questions of sustainability.
Alan Greenspan
#3. I've always considered myself more of a mathematician than a psychologist.
Alan Greenspan
#4. We as central bankers need not be concerned if a collapsing financial asset bubble does not threaten to impair the real economy, its production, jobs and price stability.
Alan Greenspan
#5. You can't have the capitalist system if an increasing number of people think it is unjust.
Alan Greenspan
#6. If prices go down, we will have problems - problems in the sense of spillover to other areas, Greenspan said. While he hasn't seen such spreading yet, I expect to.
Alan Greenspan
#7. We really can't forecast all that well, and yet we pretend that we can, but we really can't.
Alan Greenspan
#8. The very nature of finance is that it cannot be profitable unless it is significantly leveraged ... and as long as there is debt, there can be failure and contagion.
Alan Greenspan
#9. At the risk of some oversimplification, if the skill composition of our work force meshed fully with the needs of our increasingly complex capital-stock, wage-skill differentials would be stable, and the percentage changes in wage rates would be the same for all job grades.
Alan Greenspan
#10. If I say something which you understand fully in this regard, I probably made a mistake.
Alan Greenspan
#11. I cannot conceive of a politically feasible solution to this problem which will overdo cutting the deficit, where overdoing means harming the economy. It might be technically possible, but it is not realistic.
Alan Greenspan
#12. When you go back and look at American history, it's not terribly different from Canadian history. If you weren't self-reliant on the prairie, you wouldn't survive.
Alan Greenspan
#14. Regulators have not been able to achieve the level of future clarity required to act pre-emptively. The problem is not lack of regulation but unrealistic expectations. What we confront in reality is uncertainty, some of it frighteningly so ...
Alan Greenspan
#15. Without the triggers, that tax cut is irreponsible fiscal policy. Eventually, I think that will be the consensus view.
Alan Greenspan
#16. The arts develop skills and habits of mind that are important for workers in the new economy of ideas.
Alan Greenspan
#17. All taxes are a drag on economic growth. It's only a question of degree.
Alan Greenspan
#19. American consumers might benefit if lenders provided greater mortgage product alternatives to the traditional fixed-rate mortgage.
Alan Greenspan
#20. There's no other job in public life that is like chairman of the Fed.
Alan Greenspan
#21. Fear is a far more dominant force in human behaviour than euphoria - I would never have expected that or given it a moment's thought before, but it shows up in the data in so many ways.
Alan Greenspan
#22. Fear invariably and universally induces disengagement, and disengagement is negative division of labor.
Alan Greenspan
#24. I was sort of shocked when it all of a sudden turned out that I got all A's through college, with the exception of two B's in the first term. I never envisaged myself as summa cum laude.
Alan Greenspan
#25. The culture of Greece is not the same as the culture of Germany, and to fuse them into a single unit is extremely difficult.
Alan Greenspan
#26. It's only when the markets are perceived to have exhausted themselves on the downside that they turn. Trying to prevent them from going down just merely prolongs the agony.
Alan Greenspan
#27. The purpose of a politician is to be a leader. A politician has to lead. Otherwise he's just a follower.
Alan Greenspan
#28. The probability of ten consecutive heads is 0.1 percent; thus, when you have millions of coin tossers, or investors, in the end there will be thousands of very successful practitioners of coin tossing, or stock picking.
Alan Greenspan
#29. We are in the midst of a once-in-a-century credit tsunami. Central banks and governments are being required to take unprecedented measures. Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholders' equity are in a state of shocked disbelief.
Alan Greenspan
#30. I came to a stark realization: chronic surpluses could be almost as destabilizing as chronic deficits.
Alan Greenspan
#31. The process of innovation is, of course, never ending.
Alan Greenspan
#32. Gold, unlike all other commodities, is a currency ... and the major thrust in the demand for gold is not for jewelry. It's not for anything other than an escape from what is perceived to be a fiat money system, paper money, that seems to be deteriorating.
Alan Greenspan
#33. The recent evidence increasingly suggests that an economic expansion is already well under way, although an array of influences unique to this business cycle seems likely to moderate its speed
Alan Greenspan
#34. The central focus of what we are doing at the Fed is to keep inflation from accelerating - and preferably decelerating.
Alan Greenspan
#35. I made a mistake in presuming that the self-interests of organisations, specifically banks and others, were such that they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders and their equity in the firms,
Alan Greenspan
#36. You have to really stretch your imagination to infer what the intrinsic value of Bitcoin is. I haven't been able to do it. Maybe somebody else can.
Alan Greenspan
#37. In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation. There is no safe store of value.
Alan Greenspan
#38. It has been my experience that competency in mathematics, both in numerical manipulations and in understanding its conceptual foundations, enhances a person's ability to handle the more ambiguous and qualitative relationships that dominate our day-to-day financial decision-making
Alan Greenspan
#39. The true measure of a career is to be able to be content, even proud, that you succeeded through your own endeavors without leaving a trail of casualties in your wake.
Alan Greenspan
#40. Regulation of derivatives transactions that are privately negotiated by professionals is unnecessary.
Alan Greenspan
#41. Excessive optimism sows the seeds of its own reversal.
Alan Greenspan
#42. I've always argued that this country has benefited immensely from the fact that we draw people from all over the world.
Alan Greenspan
#43. There are errors in this book. I do not know where they are. If I did they wouldn't be there. But with close to two hundred thousand words my probabilistic mind tells me some are wrong.
Alan Greenspan
#44. Institutions of the newer participants in global finance had not been tested, until recently ... recent crisis have underscored certain financial structure vulnerabilities that are not readily assuaged in the short run.
Alan Greenspan
#45. As long as we issue fiat currency, I see no alternative to a legal tender law.
Alan Greenspan
#47. In an economy that already has lost some momentum, one must remain alert to the possibility that greater caution and weakening asset values in financial markets could signal or precipitate an excessive softening in household and business spending.
Alan Greenspan
#48. We need, in effect, to make the phantom 'lock-boxes' around the trust fund real.
Alan Greenspan
#49. Before I met Ayn Rand, I was a logical positivist, and accordingly, I didn't believe in absolutes, moral or otherwise. If I couldn't prove a proposition with facts and figures, it was without merit.
Alan Greenspan
#50. Revolutions are something you see only in retrospect.
Alan Greenspan
#51. What we have found over the years in the marketplace is that derivatives have been an extraordinarily useful vehicle to transfer risk from those who shouldn't be taking it to those who are willing to and are capable of doing so.
Alan Greenspan
#52. I'm a free-market economist from years and years back, and I've never veered from that.
Alan Greenspan
#53. I have found no greater satisfaction than achieving success through honest dealing and strict adherence to the view that, for you to gain, those you deal with should gain as well.
Alan Greenspan
#54. Protectionism will do little to create jobs and if foreigners retaliate, we will surely lose jobs.
Alan Greenspan
#55. It's hard to tell which assets will be toxic. The best way to ensure that only shareholders and banks feel it is have adequate capital.
Alan Greenspan
#56. History cannot be reduced to a set of statistics and probabilities.
Alan Greenspan
#57. Our market system depends critically on trust-trust in the word of our colleagues and trust in the word of those with whom we do business.
Alan Greenspan
#58. I believe that the general growth in large [financial] institutions have occurred in the context of an underlying structure of markets in which many of the larger risks are dramatically
I should say, fully
hedged.
Alan Greenspan
#59. I do not deny that many appear to have succeeded in a material way by cutting corners and by manipulating associates, both in their professional and in their personal lives. But material success is possible in this world and far more satisfying when it comes without exploiting others.
Alan Greenspan
#60. It is very difficult to predict when a bond crisis could happen.
Alan Greenspan
#61. I always believed in animal spirits. It's not their existence that is new. It's the fact that they are not random events, but actually replicate in-bred qualities of human nature which create those animal spirits.
Alan Greenspan
#62. Finance is wholly different from the rest the economy.
Alan Greenspan
#63. Improvements in lending practices driven by information technology have enabled lenders to reach out to households with previously unrecognized borrowing capacities.
Alan Greenspan
#64. History has not dealt kindly with the aftermath of protracted periods of low risk premiums.
Alan Greenspan
#65. There are no easy choices. Easy choices are long gone.
Alan Greenspan
#66. The gut-feel of the 55-year old trader is more important than the mathematical elegance of the 25-year old genius.
Alan Greenspan
#67. The only sustainable way to increase demand for vacant houses is to spur the formation of new households. Admitting more skilled immigrants, who tend to earn enough to buy homes, would accomplish that while paying other dividends to the U.S. economy.
Alan Greenspan
#68. Significantly opening up immigration to skilled workers solves two problems. The companies could hire the educated workers they need. And those workers would compete with high-income people, driving more income equality.
Alan Greenspan
#70. Greenspan, who knew so much more than most, knew far less than most supposed ...
Alan Greenspan
#72. If all currencies are moving up or down together, the question is: relative to what? Gold is the canary in the coal mine. It signals problems with respect to currency markets. Central banks should pay attention to it.
Alan Greenspan
#73. There is nothing to guarantee the superior judgment, knowledge, and integrity of an inspector or a bureaucrat-and the deadly consequences of entrusting him with arbitrary power are obvious.
Alan Greenspan
#74. Forecasting our futures is built into our psyches because we will soon have to manage that future. We have no choice. No matter how often we fail, we can never stop trying.
Alan Greenspan
#75. The economy is turning, and credit comes in with a lag, .. To the extent that a number of small firms are finding it difficult to get the credit they need at a price they can afford, that's likely to change for the better.
Alan Greenspan
#76. If you think you understand what I am saying you do not understand what I am saying.
Alan Greenspan
#77. Markets do very weird things because it reacts to how people behave, and sometimes people are a little screwy.
Alan Greenspan
#78. It seems superfluous to constrain trading in some of the newer derivatives and other innovative financial contracts of the past decade. The worst have failed; investors no longer fund them and are not likely to in the future.
Alan Greenspan
#79. We may be in a rapidly evolving international financial system with all the bells and whistles of the so-called new economy. But the old-economy rules of prudence are as formidable as ever. We violate them at our own peril.
Alan Greenspan
#80. I have long argued that paying down the national debt is beneficial for the economy: it keeps interest rates lower than they otherwise would be and frees savings to finance increases in the capital stock, thereby boosting productivity and real incomes.
Alan Greenspan
#81. [Republicans] swapped principle for power. They ended up with neither. They deserved to lose.
Alan Greenspan
#82. Putin probably, almost certainly, thinks that one of the great disasters of the 20th century was the demise of the Soviet Union. It's very obvious that he's trying to work its way back and maintain something similar to that sort of institution.
Alan Greenspan
#83. The only way to have several currencies from divergent nations lumped together is if they are culturally close, such as Germany, the Netherlands and Austria. If they aren't, it simply can't continue to work.
Alan Greenspan
#84. Cash is available and we should use that in larger amounts, as is necessary, to solve the problems of the stress of this.
Alan Greenspan
#85. I must say, I never expected to see the day where I would be talking about anything other than reducing the debt, I'm running into the tyranny of zero, which is where you can't reduce (the debt) any more
Alan Greenspan
#86. I was a fairly good amateur musician, and I was an average professional. But the one thing I saw was that the big band business was fading.
Alan Greenspan
#87. Corruption, embezzlement, fraud, these are all characteristics which exist everywhere. It is regrettably the way human nature functions, whether we like it or not. What successful economies do is keep it to a minimum. No one has ever eliminated any of that stuff.
Alan Greenspan
#89. There is a limit to how much the United States Treasury can borrow.
Alan Greenspan
#90. The use of a growing array of derivatives and the related application of more-sophisticated approaches to measuring and managing risk are key factors underpinning the greater resilience of our largest financial institutions ... Derivatives have permitted the unbundling of financial risks.
Alan Greenspan
#91. The problem is you cannot have free global trade with highly restrictive, regulated domestic markets.
Alan Greenspan
#92. The only thing that was economic, I might say, about my music career, aside from the fact that I did everybody's tax returns in the band, was the decision I made to leave the music business on economic grounds.
Alan Greenspan
#93. If somebody had said to me in June or July of 1987, 'We'd like you to become chairman of the Federal Reserve, but you're never allowed to discuss any economics after you leave,' I'd have said, 'Forget it.' What do they want me to do? Become an anthropologist?'
Alan Greenspan
#94. When trust is lost, a nation's ability to transact business is palpably undermined.
Alan Greenspan
#95. The person I liked the best was Gerald R. Ford. He was the most decent man in politics I ever had any relationships with.
Alan Greenspan
#96. Crony capitalism is essentially a condition in which ... public officials are giving favours to people in the private sector in payment of political favours.
Alan Greenspan
#97. The more flexible an economy, the greater its ability to self-correct in response to inevitable, often unanticipated, disturbances and thus to contain the size and consequences of cyclical imbalances.
Alan Greenspan
#98. Regulation - which is based on force and fear - undermines the moral base of business dealings. It becomes cheaper to bribe a building inspector than to meet his standards of construction. Protection of the consumer by regulation is thus illusory.
Alan Greenspan
#99. Much fiscal policy is implemented, not through spending increases, but through tax credits and other so-called tax expenditures. The markets should respond to them as they do spending cuts, with little contraction in economic activity.
Alan Greenspan
#100. I was a good amateur but only an average professional. I soon realized that there was a limit to how far I could rise in the music business, so I left the band and enrolled at New York University.
Alan Greenspan
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