Top 100 Greenspan's Quotes
#1. 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
#2. Greenspan's policies have created huge amounts of wealth for Arizona.
Ernst Happel
#3. Greenspan's eventual explanation for the growing gap between stock prices and actual productivity was that, fortuitously, the laws of nature had changed
humanity had reached a happy stage of history where bullshit could be used as rocket fuel.
Matt Taibbi
#4. The issue of economics is not something I've understood as well as I should. I've got Greenspan's book.
John McCain
#5. 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
#6. 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
#7. 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
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. By far the most significant event in finance during the past decade has been the extraordinary development and expansion of financial derivatives.
Alan Greenspan
#11. 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
#12. 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
#13. No matter how skillful the trading scheme, over the long haul, abnormal returns are sustained only through abnormal exposure to risk.
Alan Greenspan
#14. When I'm developing a recipe with brown butter - I know how much butter I want in the end and I so I start with more butter than I'll need.
Dorie Greenspan
#15. The central focus of what we are doing at the Fed is to keep inflation from accelerating - and preferably decelerating.
Alan Greenspan
#16. 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
#17. You can use melted butter instead of oil, but your cake may be a little denser.
Dorie Greenspan
#18. 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
#19. 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
#20. 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
#21. The process of innovation is, of course, never ending.
Alan Greenspan
#22. I came to a stark realization: chronic surpluses could be almost as destabilizing as chronic deficits.
Alan Greenspan
#24. Cooking and baking are pleasures and I want everyone to be able to experience and share them.
Dorie Greenspan
#25. 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
#26. We're a democratic society. Shutting down the government should not be on the agenda.
Alan Greenspan
#27. [On reporters trying to cajole a smile from her husband, Alan Greenspan:] For a Federal Reserve chairman, that was a smile.
Andrea Mitchell
#28. When trust is lost, a nation's ability to transact business is palpably undermined.
Alan Greenspan
#29. 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
#30. I don't know if there's a method that I'd like to see younger people bring back, I just want to see everyone of every age in the kitchen.
Dorie Greenspan
#31. 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
#32. This shit is for amateurs. The whole world's a fucking drag show. Look at them, they are all in costume.
David Greenspan
#33. Whenever you brown butter, some of it is lost - water evaporates, milk solids fall to the bottom of the pan, that kind of thing. It's possible that in browning the butter you ended up making the dough with too little butter.
Dorie Greenspan
#34. 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
#35. Without calling the overall national issue a bubble, it's pretty clear that it's an unsustainable underlying pattern.
Alan Greenspan
#36. 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
#37. 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
#38. It's hard to overemphasize how important Ford's deregulation was. True, most of the benefits took years to unfold-rail freight rates, for example hardly budged at first. Yet deregulation set the stage for an enormous wave of creative destruction in the 1980s: ...
Alan Greenspan
#39. 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
#40. If we are to remain preeminent in transforming knowledge into economic value, America's system of higher education must remain the world's leader in generating scientific and technological breakthrough, and in meeting the challenge to educate workers.
Alan Greenspan
#41. 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
#42. The number one problem in today's generation and economy is the lack of financial literacy.
Alan Greenspan
#43. 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
#44. 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
#45. Excessive optimism sows the seeds of its own reversal.
Alan Greenspan
#46. 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
#47. 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
#48. 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
#49. Credit-default swaps, I think, have serious problems associated with them.
Alan Greenspan
#50. The free-market economist Friedrich von Hayek once said that "without a theory, the facts are silent." But for Greenspan, with his theory, the facts became invisible.
Anonymous
#51. Regulation of derivatives transactions that are privately negotiated by professionals is unnecessary.
Alan Greenspan
#52. 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
#53. I've always considered myself more of a mathematician than a psychologist.
Alan Greenspan
#55. 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
#56. 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
#57. If I say something which you understand fully in this regard, I probably made a mistake.
Alan Greenspan
#58. 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
#59. 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
#60. We really can't forecast all that well, and yet we pretend that we can, but we really can't.
Alan Greenspan
#61. 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
#62. You can't have the capitalist system if an increasing number of people think it is unjust.
Alan Greenspan
#63. 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
#64. Attention, learning, and problem solving depend in part on the ability to plan and sequence actions and ideas. The Interactive Metronome(R) helps individuals systematically exercise and often improve basic motor planning and sequencing capacities.
Stanley Greenspan
#65. 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
#66. You wouldn't want Alan Greenspan to write the instructions for assembling a beach chair.
Robert Orben
#67. No man bears more responsibility for the present worldwide financial crisis and coming depression than Alan Greenspan.
Bill Bonner
#68. Chairman Greenspan is, of course, a master.
Ben Bernanke
#69. 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
#70. 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
#71. I often say that eggs and sugar should be beaten until they thicken and pale and sometimes, when there are lots of yolks, that's lemon colored.
Dorie Greenspan
#72. If our society were truly to appreciate the significance of children's emotional ties throughout the first years of life, it would no longer tolerate children growing up or parents having to struggle in situations which could not possibly nourish healthy growth.
Stanley Greenspan
#74. I agree with what the Chairman Greenspan said whatever it is that he did say.
Robert Rubin
#75. Since 1948 I have spent every single day thinking how the economic and political worlds have changed.
Alan Greenspan
#76. One of the major problems with China is that its innovation is largely borrowed technology.
Alan Greenspan
#77. 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
#78. 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
#79. The purpose of a politician is to be a leader. A politician has to lead. Otherwise he's just a follower.
Alan Greenspan
#80. Real French people don't bake! At least they don't bake anything complicated, finicky, tricky or unreliable.
Dorie Greenspan
#81. Amateurs want to be right. Professionals want to make money.
Alan Greenspan
#82. 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
#83. 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
#84. 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
#86. Fear invariably and universally induces disengagement, and disengagement is negative division of labor.
Alan Greenspan
#87. 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
#88. Diplomacy is really far less important than the stock movements within Russia.
Alan Greenspan
#89. We can guarantee cash benefits as far out and at whatever size you like, but we cannot guarantee their purchasing power.
Alan Greenspan
#90. There's no other job in public life that is like chairman of the Fed.
Alan Greenspan
#91. 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
#92. American consumers might benefit if lenders provided greater mortgage product alternatives to the traditional fixed-rate mortgage.
Alan Greenspan
#93. 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
#94. And by the way, I would not only reappoint Greenspan; if Greenspan would happen to die, God forbid, I would do like they did in the movie 'Weekend at Bernie's.' I would prop him up and put a pair of dark glasses on him.
John McCain
#95. I guess I should warn you, if I turn out to be particularly clear, you've probably misunderstood what I've said.
Alan Greenspan
#97. All taxes are a drag on economic growth. It's only a question of degree.
Alan Greenspan
#98. The arts develop skills and habits of mind that are important for workers in the new economy of ideas.
Alan Greenspan
#99. Good discipline is more than just punishing or laying down the law. It is liking children and letting them see that they are liked. It is caring enough about them to provide good, clear rules for their protection.
Stanley Greenspan
#100. Without the triggers, that tax cut is irreponsible fiscal policy. Eventually, I think that will be the consensus view.
Alan Greenspan
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