Top 100 Alan Greenspan Sayings
#1. No man bears more responsibility for the present worldwide financial crisis and coming depression than Alan Greenspan.
Bill Bonner
#2. You wouldn't want Alan Greenspan to write the instructions for assembling a beach chair.
Robert Orben
#3. [On reporters trying to cajole a smile from her husband, Alan Greenspan:] For a Federal Reserve chairman, that was a smile.
Andrea Mitchell
#5. The job of the Federal Reserve is "to know when to remove the punch bowl at the party." Under Alan Greenspan's leadership its motto became "let's all get drunk and see what happens." It is now the morning after and the world will be dealing with Greenspan's hangover for the next several decades.
Said Elias Dawlabani
#6. Remember, Alan Greenspan was a member of Ayn Rand's collective. To understand this is to understand why we are doomed with the Federal Reserve.
Peter Fonda
#7. Our second big mistake - we thought that risk could be quantified. Our third big mistake - Alan Greenspan. The
Jade Chang
#8. If you believe that markets operate in Alan Greenspan fashion, then you don't inquire into the details.
Oliver E. Williamson
#9. She pokes at a very wrinkled baked potato that somehow reminds me of Alan Greenspan.
Nic Tatano
#10. I served on the budget committee in the Senate, and I remember as vividly as if it were yesterday when we had a hearing in which Alan Greenspan came and justified increasing spending and cutting taxes, saying that we didn't really need to pay down the debt - outrageous in my view.
Hillary Clinton
#11. But the trouble is that he [Alan Greenspan] had been an Ayn Rander. You can take the boy out of the cult but you can't take the cult out of the boy.
Paul Samuelson
#12. One of the major problems with China is that its innovation is largely borrowed technology.
Alan Greenspan
#13. Since 1948 I have spent every single day thinking how the economic and political worlds have changed.
Alan Greenspan
#14. An almost hysterical antagonism toward the gold standard is one issue which unites statists of all persuasions. They seem to sense ... that gold and economic freedom are inseparable.
Alan Greenspan
#15. 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
#16. I've always considered myself more of a mathematician than a psychologist.
Alan Greenspan
#17. 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
#18. You can't have the capitalist system if an increasing number of people think it is unjust.
Alan Greenspan
#19. 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
#20. We really can't forecast all that well, and yet we pretend that we can, but we really can't.
Alan Greenspan
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. If I say something which you understand fully in this regard, I probably made a mistake.
Alan Greenspan
#24. 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
#25. 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
#27. 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
#28. Without the triggers, that tax cut is irreponsible fiscal policy. Eventually, I think that will be the consensus view.
Alan Greenspan
#29. The arts develop skills and habits of mind that are important for workers in the new economy of ideas.
Alan Greenspan
#30. All taxes are a drag on economic growth. It's only a question of degree.
Alan Greenspan
#32. I guess I should warn you, if I turn out to be particularly clear, you've probably misunderstood what I've said.
Alan Greenspan
#33. Europe is very critical to the United States in the sense not only do we have a fourth of our exports there, but more importantly, a significant proportion of the foreign affiliate profits in fact, half of U.S. corporations, are in Europe.
Alan Greenspan
#34. American consumers might benefit if lenders provided greater mortgage product alternatives to the traditional fixed-rate mortgage.
Alan Greenspan
#35. Although the outlook is clouded by a number of uncertainties, the central tendencies of the projections .. imply continued good economic performance in the United States.
Alan Greenspan
#36. There's no other job in public life that is like chairman of the Fed.
Alan Greenspan
#37. 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
#38. Diplomacy is really far less important than the stock movements within Russia.
Alan Greenspan
#39. The current financial crisis in the US is likely to be judged in retrospect as the most wrenching since the end of the Second World War.
Alan Greenspan
#40. Fear invariably and universally induces disengagement, and disengagement is negative division of labor.
Alan Greenspan
#42. 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
#43. 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
#44. 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
#45. Amateurs want to be right. Professionals want to make money.
Alan Greenspan
#46. The purpose of a politician is to be a leader. A politician has to lead. Otherwise he's just a follower.
Alan Greenspan
#47. The United States can pay any debt it has because we can always print money to do that. So there is zero probability of default.
Alan Greenspan
#48. We can guarantee cash benefits as far out and at whatever size you like, but we cannot guarantee their purchasing power.
Alan Greenspan
#49. 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
#50. We're a democratic society. Shutting down the government should not be on the agenda.
Alan Greenspan
#51. 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
#52. I came to a stark realization: chronic surpluses could be almost as destabilizing as chronic deficits.
Alan Greenspan
#53. The process of innovation is, of course, never ending.
Alan Greenspan
#54. One of the problems with hedge funds is that they are changing so rapidly. If you have the balance sheet that closed business last night, by 11 A.M. this morning, that won't tell you very much about what they're doing.
Alan Greenspan
#55. 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
#56. 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
#57. I've been in and out of Wall Street since 1949, and I've never seen the type of animosity between government and Wall Street. And I'm not sure where it comes from, but I suspect it's got to do with a general schism in this society which is really becoming ever more destructive.
Alan Greenspan
#58. The central focus of what we are doing at the Fed is to keep inflation from accelerating - and preferably decelerating.
Alan Greenspan
#59. No matter how skillful the trading scheme, over the long haul, abnormal returns are sustained only through abnormal exposure to risk.
Alan Greenspan
#60. 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
#61. 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
#62. By far the most significant event in finance during the past decade has been the extraordinary development and expansion of financial derivatives.
Alan Greenspan
#63. 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
#64. 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
#65. I wasn't able to do much reading when I was chairman of the Reserve Board. The workload was too large, and the luxury of reading was not available to me. So I caught up a good deal when I left office.
Alan Greenspan
#66. There is a huge number of people outside our borders who would love to come here. In fact, many of them come here, get well educated, and then are required to leave ... This is a factor in income inequality.
Alan Greenspan
#67. 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
#68. I get so engaged when I have a problem you cannot solve that I just cannot break away from what I am doing - I keep thinking and thinking and cannot stop.
Alan Greenspan
#69. Regulation of derivatives transactions that are privately negotiated by professionals is unnecessary.
Alan Greenspan
#70. Credit-default swaps, I think, have serious problems associated with them.
Alan Greenspan
#71. Well, you probably will always believe there should be laws against fraud, and I don't think there is any need for a law against fraud.
Alan Greenspan
#72. To succeed, you will soon learn, as I did, the importance of a solid foundation in the basics of education - literacy, both verbal and numerical, and communication skills.
Alan Greenspan
#73. Excessive optimism sows the seeds of its own reversal.
Alan Greenspan
#74. I've always argued that this country has benefited immensely from the fact that we draw people from all over the world.
Alan Greenspan
#75. 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
#76. 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
#77. Manufacturing capacity is not a rigid level against which one bounces. When you are dealing with a world economy, with a flexibility to employ production facilities other than one's own, then the concept of capacity is vaguer.
Alan Greenspan
#78. As long as we issue fiat currency, I see no alternative to a legal tender law.
Alan Greenspan
#80. 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
#81. History demonstrates that participants in financial markets are susceptible to waves of optimism. Excessive optimism shows the seeds of its own reversal in the form of imbalances that tend to grow over time.
Alan Greenspan
#82. What I see in the corporate sector is very clearly an issue of a major shortfall in the issue of, what some people call confidence, but whatever you want to call it. Clearly people are looking out in the very distant future and they are saying that it is too complex.
Alan Greenspan
#83. We need, in effect, to make the phantom 'lock-boxes' around the trust fund real.
Alan Greenspan
#84. 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
#85. Every economy exists, no matter what the level of democracy, has elements of crony capitalism. It's - given human nature and given the democratic structures, which we all, I assume, adhere to, that is an inevitable consequence.
Alan Greenspan
#86. Remember what we're looking at. Gold is a currency. It is still, by all evidence, a premier currency, that no fiat currency, including the dollar, can match.
Alan Greenspan
#87. Revolutions are something you see only in retrospect.
Alan Greenspan
#88. Chinese productivity is the highest in the world but the way they do it is by borrowing the technology from abroad, either by joint ventures or other means.
Alan Greenspan
#89. Indeed, better risk management may be the only truly necessary element of success in banking.
Alan Greenspan
#90. 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
#91. I'm a free-market economist from years and years back, and I've never veered from that.
Alan Greenspan
#92. 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
#93. Protectionism will do little to create jobs and if foreigners retaliate, we will surely lose jobs.
Alan Greenspan
#94. The number one problem in today's generation and economy is the lack of financial literacy.
Alan Greenspan
#95. If you get beyond the political rhetoric [and assembled a group to solve Social Security] it would take them 15 minutes. It would take them 15 minutes only because 10 minutes was used for pleasantries.
Alan Greenspan
#96. Nor can private counterparties restrict supplies of gold, another commodity whose derivatives are often traded over-the-counter, where central banks stand ready to lease gold in increasing quantities should the price rise.
Alan Greenspan
#97. 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
#98. History cannot be reduced to a set of statistics and probabilities.
Alan Greenspan
#99. 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
#100. I'm not denying that monopolies are terrible things, but I am denying that it is readily easy to resolve them through legislation of that nature.
Alan Greenspan
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