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

I agree with what the Chairman Greenspan said whatever it is that he did say. ~ Robert Rubin

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

One of my favorite examples involves Dr. Peter Greenspan, a Jewish obstetrician-gynecologist who also teaches at a medical school. The more he read books by critics who were trying to attack the prophecies, the more he recognized the flaws in their arguments. Ironically, concluded Greenspan, "I think I actually came to faith in Y'shua [Jesus] by reading what detractors wrote."36 ~ Ravi Zacharias

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

We need to take a less narrow look at our children's problems and, instead, see them as windows of opportunity - a way of exploring and understanding all facets of our children's development. If we can understand the underlying developmental process, we can see a child's struggles as signs of striving toward growth instead of chronic problems or attempts to aggravate adults. ~ Stanley Greenspan

Real French people don't bake! At least they don't bake anything complicated, finicky, tricky or unreliable. ~ Dorie 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

Greenspan advised the American people to buy - he repeated the old mantra: 'spending is patriotic'. He also managed to convince them that if they did not have the money, that shouldn't stop them. They would 'pay later'. To a certain extent he was correct, we are all having to 'pay later' ... we may even never stop paying. ~ Gilad Atzmon

Learning first occurs as a part of emotional interactions; it involves the split-second initiatives that children take as they try to engage other people,interact with them communicate and reason with them. ~ Stanley 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

Self-esteem is an inner feeling: Sometimes it corresponds with outer reality, and sometimes it doesn't. ~ Stanley 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

If your child is going to develop a healthy personality with the capacity to remain intact and grow, she must learn how to test reality, regulate her impulses, stabilize her moods, integrate her feelings and actions, focus her concentration and plan. ~ Stanley Greenspan

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

Parents are led to believe that they must be consistent, that is, always respond to the same issue the same way. Consistency is good up to a point but your child also needs to understand context and subtlety ... much of adult life is governed by context: what is appropriate in one setting is not appropriate in another; the way something is said may be more important than what is said ... ~ Stanley Greenspan

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

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

It was Greenspan who through some excessive deregulation prepared the monetary ground for the rise of the subprime mortgage companies: a lending market that specialises in high-risk mortgages and loans.
'Innovation', said Greenspan in April 2005, 'has brought about a multitude of new products, such as subprime loans and niche credit programs for immigrants'.
It is almost touching to find out that Greenspan cares so much about immigrants. ~ Gilad Atzmon

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

Greenspan tells us what to do. Someone should take him out and hang him. ~ Hutton Gibson

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

Anything you make in a 'normal' sized loaf pan can be made in the longer pan - you just have to increase the recipe proportionately. ~ Dorie 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

To be motivated to sit at home and study, instead of going out and playing, children need a sense of themselves over time
they need to be able to picture themselves in the future ... If they can't, then they're simply reacting to daily events, responding to the needs of the moment
for pleasure, for affiliation, for acceptance. ~ Stanley Greenspan

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

Cooking and baking are pleasures and I want everyone to be able to experience and share them. ~ Dorie 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

Damn inflation, full speed ahead,' Greenspan has said in both action and word. I think an investor should believe him and invest accordingly. ~ Bill Gross

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

I use color as my chief guide. But I always squeeze an avocado - you want the fruit to feel close to the skin. If you can feel a separation, the avocado is past its prime. The avocado should have a little give, but not much. ~ Dorie 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