Alan Greenspan Quotes

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

Under the gold standard, a free banking system stands as the protector of an economy's stability and balanced growth ... The abandonment of the gold standard made it possible for the welfare statists to use the banking system as a means to an unlimited expansion of credit ... In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation ~ Alan Greenspan

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

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

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

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

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

The problem is you cannot have free global trade with highly restrictive, regulated domestic markets. ~ Alan Greenspan

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

A decline in the national housing price level would need to be substantial to trigger a significant rise in foreclosures, because the vast majority of homeowners have built up substantial equity in their homes despite large mortgage-market financed withdrawals of home equity in recent years. ~ Alan Greenspan

If we allow terrorism to undermine our freedom of action, we could reverse at least part of the palpable gains achieved by postwar globalization. It is incumbent upon us not to allow that to happen. ~ Alan Greenspan

Rules cannot take the place of character. ~ Alan Greenspan

[Ben Carson] critics say that your inexperience shows. You've suggested that the Baltic States are not a part of NATO, you were unfamiliar with the major political parties and government in Israel, and domestically, you thought Alan Greenspan had been treasury secretary instead of federal reserve chair. ~ Megyn Kelly

The only way you get economic progress, real standards of living moving higher, is to have the savings of the society continuously invested in the cutting-edge technologies. And those technologies which are obsolescent get dropped out. ~ Alan Greenspan

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

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

We need, in effect, to make the phantom 'lock-boxes' around the trust fund real. ~ Alan Greenspan

Look, I'm very much in favor of tax cuts, but not with borrowed money. And the problem that we've gotten into in recent years is spending programs with borrowed money, tax cuts with borrowed money, and at the end of the day that proves disastrous. And my view is I don't think we can play subtle policy here. ~ Alan Greenspan

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

There is a limit to how much the United States Treasury can borrow. ~ Alan Greenspan

People don't realize that we cannot forecast the future. What we can do is have probabilities of what causes what, but that's as far as we go. And I've had a very successful career as a forecaster, starting in 1948 forward. The number of mistakes I have made are just awesome. There is no number large enough to account for that. ~ Alan Greenspan

Without calling the overall national issue a bubble, it's pretty clear that it's an unsustainable underlying pattern. ~ Alan Greenspan

Alan Greenspan is unskilled; you don't take the unskilled seriously. ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb

As long as we issue fiat currency, I see no alternative to a legal tender law. ~ Alan Greenspan

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

She pokes at a very wrinkled baked potato that somehow reminds me of Alan Greenspan. ~ Nic Tatano

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

Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the 'hidden' confiscation of wealth. Gold stands in the way of this insidious process. It stands as a protector of property rights. ~ Alan Greenspan

I don't know where the stock market is going, but I will say this, that if it continues higher, this will do more to stimulate the economy than anything we've been talking about today or anything anybody else was talking about. ~ Alan Greenspan

The phone rang. It was a familiar voice.

It was Alan Greenspan. Paul O'Neill had tried to stay in touch with people who had served under Gerald Ford, and he'd been reasonably conscientious about it. Alan Greenspan was the exception. In his case, the effort was constant and purposeful. When Greenspan was the chairman of Ford's Council of Economic Advisers, and O'Neill was number two at OMB, they had become a kind of team. Never social so much. They never talked about families or outside interests. It was all about ideas: Medicare financing or block grants - a concept that O'Neill basically invented to balance federal power and local autonomy - or what was really happening in the economy. It became clear that they thought well together. President Ford used to have them talk about various issues while he listened. After a while, each knew how the other's mind worked, the way married couples do.

In the past fifteen years, they'd made a point of meeting every few months. It could be in New York, or Washington, or Pittsburgh. They talked about everything, just as always. Greenspan, O'Neill told a friend, "doesn't have many people who don't want something from him, who will talk straight to him. So that's what we do together - straight talk."

O'Neill felt some straight talk coming in.

"Paul, I'll be blunt. We really need you down here," Greenspan said. "There is a real chance to make lasting changes. We could be a team at the key moment, t ~ Ron Suskind

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

No matter how skillful the trading scheme, over the long haul, abnormal returns are sustained only through abnormal exposure to risk. ~ Alan Greenspan

[Republicans] swapped principle for power. They ended up with neither. They deserved to lose. ~ Alan Greenspan

Our second big mistake - we thought that risk could be quantified. Our third big mistake - Alan Greenspan. The ~ Jade Chang

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

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

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

If I seem unduly clear to you, you must have misunderstood what I said. -- Speaking to a Senate Committee in 1987, as quoted in the Guardian Weekly, November 4, 2005. ~ Alan Greenspan

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

Since 1948 I have spent every single day thinking how the economic and political worlds have changed. ~ Alan Greenspan

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

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

[On reporters trying to cajole a smile from her husband, Alan Greenspan:] For a Federal Reserve chairman, that was a smile. ~ Andrea Mitchell

What a sound money system does is to stabilize all the elements in it, and reduces the uncertainty that people confront. And the one thing all human beings do when they are confronted with uncertainty is pull back, withdraw, disengage, and that means economic activity, which is really dealing with people, just goes straight down. ~ Alan Greenspan

Credit-default swaps, I think, have serious problems associated with them. ~ Alan Greenspan

When trust is lost, a nation's ability to transact business is palpably undermined. ~ Alan Greenspan

Fear and euphoria are dominant forces, and fear is many multiples the size of euphoria. Bubbles go up very slowly as euphoria builds. Then fear hits, and it comes down very sharply. When I started to look at that, I was sort of intellectually shocked. Contagion is the critical phenomenon which causes the thing to fall apart. ~ Alan Greenspan

But rules cannot substitute for character. ~ Alan Greenspan

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

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

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

The guiding purpose of the government regulator is to prevent rather than to create something. ~ Alan Greenspan

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

Since I've become a central banker, I've learned to mumble with great incoherence. If I seem unduly clear to you, you must have misunderstood what I said. ~ Alan Greenspan

I don't think it's possible for the Fed to end its easy-money policies in a trouble-free manner. Recent episodes in which Fed officials hinted at a shift toward higher interest rates have unleashed significant volatility in markets, so there is no reason to suspect that the actual process of boosting rates would be any different. I think that real pressure is going to occur not by the initiation by the Federal Reserve, but by the markets themselves. ~ Alan Greenspan

The process of innovation is, of course, never ending. ~ Alan Greenspan

sold to the public on false pretenses, high officials confessing to ordering torture in violation of treaty and domestic law, and an economic meltdown even former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan acknowledges involved massive fraud - and no one has been prosecuted, no one has gone to prison, and Americans continue to dutifully cast their votes for the Democratic/Republican duopoly responsible for these disasters. ~ Barry Eisler

The dirty little secret is that both houses of Congress are irrelevant ... America's domestic policy is now being run by Alan Greenspan and the Federal Reserve, and America's foreign policy is now being run by the International Monetary Fund [IMF] ... when the president decides to go to war, he no longer needs a declaration of war from Congress. ~ Robert Reich

Most high-income people in our country do not realize that their incomes are being subsidized by their protection from competition from highly skilled people who are prevented from immigrating to the United States. But we need such skills in order to staff our productive economy, so that the standard of living for Americans as a whole can grow. ~ Alan Greenspan

There is no evidence that the business cycle has been repealed. ~ Alan Greenspan

Improvements in lending practices driven by information technology have enabled lenders to reach out to households with previously unrecognized borrowing capacities. ~ Alan Greenspan

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

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

People do not realize in [the U.S], for example, how tenuous our ties to international energy are. That is, we on a daily basis require continuous flow. If that flow is shut off, it causes catastrophic effects in the industrial world. And it's that which made [Saddam Hussein] far more important to get out than bin Laden.
~ Alan Greenspan

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

Alan Greenspan assures us that home prices are not prone to bubbles - or major deflations - on any national scale," he'd said. "This is ridiculous, of course ... . In 1933, during the fourth year of the Great Depression, the United States found itself in the midst of a housing crisis that put housing starts at 10% of the level of 1925. Roughly half of all mortgage debt was in default. ~ Michael Lewis

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

The arts develop skills and habits of mind that are important for workers in the new economy of ideas. ~ Alan Greenspan

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

Increased jobs are the consequence of increased trade. Increasing jobs more than output implies a fall in productivity and standards of living. That surely cannot be our goal. ~ Alan Greenspan

Diplomacy is really far less important than the stock movements within Russia. ~ Alan Greenspan

Whatever you tax, you get less of. ~ Alan Greenspan

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

I'm a free-market economist from years and years back, and I've never veered from that. ~ Alan Greenspan

I stated that I'm a libertarian Republican, which means I believe in a series of issues, such as smaller government, constraint on budget deficits, free markets, globalization, and a whole series of other things, including welfare reform. ~ Alan Greenspan

The free lunch has still to be invented. ~ Alan Greenspan

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

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

I know you think you understand what you thought I said but I'm not sure you realize that what you heard is not what I meant ~ Alan Greenspan

Greenspan, who knew so much more than most, knew far less than most supposed ... ~ Alan Greenspan

It is very difficult to predict when a bond crisis could happen. ~ Alan Greenspan

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

The abandonment of the gold standard made it possible for the welfare statists to use the banking system as a means to an unlimited expansion of credit. 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. Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the hidden confiscation of wealth. Gold stands in the way of this insidious process. It stands as a protector of property rights. If one grasps this, one has no difficulty in understanding the statists' antagonism toward the gold standard. ~ Alan Greenspan

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

We ought to be opening up our borders to skilled labour from all parts of the world because [the state of the world is as follows: ] if we were to do that we would increase the supply of skilled workers that our schools have been unable to create and as a consequence of that we would lower the average wage of skills and reduce the degree of income inequality in this country. ~ Alan Greenspan

While local economies may experience significant price imbalances, a national severe price distortion seems most unlikely in the United States, given its size and diversity. ~ Alan Greenspan

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

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

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

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

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

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

One of the major problems with China is that its innovation is largely borrowed technology. ~ Alan Greenspan

Unlike old-fashioned Britain, where Tony Blair recruited Lord Levy to encourage his 'Friends of Israel' to donate their money to a party that was just about to launch a criminal war, in America Alan Greenspan provided his president with an astonishing economic boom. It seems that the prosperous conditions at home divert the attention from the disastrous war in Iraq.
Greenspan is not an amateur economist, he knew what he was doing. He knew very well that as long as Americans were doing well, buying and selling homes, his President would be able to continue implementing the 'Wolfowitz doctrine' and PNAC philosophy, destroying the 'bad Arabs' in the name of 'democracy', 'liberalism', 'ethics', and even 'women's rights'. ~ Gilad Atzmon

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

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

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

I've always considered myself more of a mathematician than a psychologist. ~ Alan Greenspan

I think the whole issue of a debt ceiling makes no sense to me whatsoever. Anybody who is remotely adroit at arithmetic doesn't need a debt ceiling to tell you where you are. ~ Alan Greenspan

If I've made myself clear, I've misspoken. ~ Alan Greenspan