Was sort of intellectually shocked. Contagion is the critical phenomenon which causes the thing to fall apart.
ALAN GREENSPANIf we are dealing with psychology, then the thermometers one uses to measure it have an effect.
More Alan Greenspan Quotes
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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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Anyone willing to do what is required to become president of the United States is thereby barred from taking that office. I’m only half joking
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Yet deregulation set the stage for an enormous wave of creative destruction in the 1980s.
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If one grasps this, one has no difficulty in understanding the statists’ antagonism toward the gold standard.
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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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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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The number of mistakes I have made are just awesome. There is no number large enough to account for that.
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American consumers might benefit if lenders provided greater mortgage product alternatives to the traditional fixed-rate mortgage.
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And whatever their publicized angst over Saddam Hussein’s ‘weapons of mass destruction.
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But material success is possible in this world and far more satisfying when it comes without exploiting others.
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The Iraq War is largely about oil.
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While these tendencies were no doubt in train in the “old,” pre-1990s economy, they accelerated over the past decade as a number of technologies with their roots in the cumulative innovations of the past half-century began to yield dramatic economic returns.
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History cannot be reduced to a set of statistics and probabilities.
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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.
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Senator, we are groping for understanding, the knowledge you assume I possess doesn’t exist’.
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Excessive optimism sows the seeds of its own reversal.
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We may be in a rapidly evolving international financial system with all the bells and whistles of the so-called new economy. But the old-economy rules of prudence are as formidable as ever. We violate them at our own peril.
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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.
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Credit-default swaps, I think, have serious problems associated with them.
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It is decidedly not true that “nice guys finish last,” as that highly original American baseball philosopher, Leo Durocher, was alleged to have said.
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Protectionism will do little to create jobs and if foreigners retaliate, we will surely lose jobs.
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I have long argued that paying down the national debt is beneficial for the economy.
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Indeed, better risk management may be the only truly necessary element of success in banking.
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Since I’ve become a central banker, I’ve learned to mumble with great incoherence.
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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.
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Unfortunately, Senator, nobody knows where the next innovative idea is coming from.
ALAN GREENSPAN