What an ideology is is a conceptual framework with the way people deal with reality.
ALAN GREENSPANStripped of its academic jargon, the welfare state is nothing more than a mechanism by which governments confiscate the wealth of the productive members of a society to support a wide variety of welfare schemes.
More Alan Greenspan Quotes
-
-
The free lunch has still to be invented.
ALAN GREENSPAN -
Then fear hits, and it comes down very sharply. When I started to look at that.
ALAN GREENSPAN -
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.
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.
ALAN GREENSPAN -
It is regrettably the way human nature functions, whether we like it or not. What successful economies do is keep it to a minimum.
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: ].
ALAN GREENSPAN -
Senator, we are groping for understanding, the knowledge you assume I possess doesn’t exist’.
ALAN GREENSPAN -
Revolutions are something you see only in retrospect.
ALAN GREENSPAN -
The worst have failed; investors no longer fund them and are not likely to in the future.
ALAN GREENSPAN -
Regulators have not been able to achieve the level of future clarity required to act pre-emptively.
ALAN GREENSPAN -
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 -
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 -
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 -
American consumers might benefit if lenders provided greater mortgage product alternatives to the traditional fixed-rate mortgage.
ALAN GREENSPAN -
If you get beyond the political rhetoric [and assembled a group to solve Social Security] it would take them 15 minutes. It would take them 15 minutes only because 10 minutes was used for pleasantries.
ALAN GREENSPAN -
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 -
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 -
Some succeed for a time. But while there may occasionally be mis-configurations among market prices that allow abnormal returns, they do not persist.
ALAN GREENSPAN -
I didn’t believe in absolutes, moral or otherwise. If I couldn’t prove a proposition with facts and figures, it was without merit.
ALAN GREENSPAN -
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 -
Fear and euphoria are dominant forces, and fear is many multiples the size of euphoria. Bubbles go up very slowly as euphoria builds.
ALAN GREENSPAN -
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 -
Improvements in lending practices driven by information technology have enabled lenders to reach out to households with previously unrecognized borrowing capacities.
ALAN GREENSPAN -
Even though some down payments are borrowed, it would take a large, and historically most unusual, fall in home prices to wipe out a significant part of home equity.
ALAN GREENSPAN -
The need for values is inbred. Their content is not.
ALAN GREENSPAN -
This decade is strewn with examples of bright people who thought they built a better mousetrap that could consistently extract abnormal returns from the financial markets.
ALAN GREENSPAN