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 GREENSPANProductivity is notoriously difficult to predict.
More Alan Greenspan Quotes
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The free lunch has still to be invented.
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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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The arts develop skills and habits of mind that are important for workers in the new economy of ideas.
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If you think you understand what I am saying you do not understand what I am saying.
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Fear and euphoria are dominant forces, and fear is many multiples the size of euphoria. Bubbles go up very slowly as euphoria builds.
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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.
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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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Any informed borrower is simply less vulnerable to fraud and abuse.
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Fiat money in extremis is accepted by nobody. Gold is always accepted.
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Nor can private counterparties restrict supplies of gold, another commodity whose derivatives are often traded over-the-counter, where central banks stand ready to lease gold in increasing quantities should the price rise.
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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.
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It signals problems with respect to currency markets. Central banks should pay attention to it.
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Stripped 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.
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And whatever their publicized angst over Saddam Hussein’s ‘weapons of mass destruction.
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I have found no greater satisfaction than achieving success through honest dealing and strict adherence to the view that, for you to gain, those you deal with should gain as well.
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And the percentage changes in wage rates would be the same for all job grades.
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There’s an interesting question here because if the gold price broke in that context, the thermometer would not be just a measuring tool. It would basically affect the underlying psychology.
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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.
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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.
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Gold, unlike all other commodities, is a currency…and the major thrust in the demand for gold is not for jewelry.
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It has been my experience that competency in mathematics, both in numerical manipulations and in understanding its conceptual foundations.
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The tub helps me relax, and it’s a great place to read.
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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.
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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.
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Indeed, better risk management may be the only truly necessary element of success in banking.
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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.
ALAN GREENSPAN