Senator, if I seem clear to you, you must have misunderstood me’.
ALAN GREENSPANThe 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.
More Alan Greenspan Quotes
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We will have more crises and none of them will look like this because no two crises have anything in common except human nature.
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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.
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Regulation of derivatives transactions that are privately negotiated by professionals is unnecessary.
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I have long argued that paying down the national debt is beneficial for the economy.
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All taxes are a drag on economic growth. It’s only a question of degree.
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Capitalism is based on self-interest and self-esteem; it holds integrity and trustworthiness as cardinal virtues and makes them pay off in the marketplace, thus demanding that men survive by means of virtue, not vices.
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Cash is available and we should use that in larger amounts, as is necessary, to solve the problems of the stress of this.
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Productivity is notoriously difficult to predict.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Protectionism will do little to create jobs and if foreigners retaliate, we will surely lose jobs.
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Without calling the overall national issue a bubble, it’s pretty clear that it’s an unsustainable underlying pattern.
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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.
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Anything that we can do to raise personal savings is very much in the interest of this country.
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I came to a stark realization: chronic surpluses could be almost as destabilizing as chronic deficits.
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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.
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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.
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So there is no reason to suspect that the actual process of boosting rates would be any different.
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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.
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I think that real pressure is going to occur not by the initiation by the Federal Reserve, but by the markets themselves.
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We can see that in the inverse relationship exhibited by price/earnings ratios and the rate of inflation in the past.
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Given our inevitably incomplete knowledge about key structural aspects of our ever-changing economy and the sometimes asymmetric costs or benefits of particular outcomes, a central bank.
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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.
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I love facts and figures. It’s like following a detective story, piecing together what’s going on in the economy.
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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