I must say, I never expected to see the day where I would be talking about anything other than reducing the debt, I’m running into the tyranny of zero, which is where you can’t reduce (the debt) any more
ALAN GREENSPANAnyone 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
More Alan Greenspan Quotes
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How do we know when irrational exuberance has unduly escalated asset values?
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Now, I only play very occasionally, and in fact, more piano than clarinet or sax.
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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.
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When trust is lost, a nation’s ability to transact business is palpably undermined.
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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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Gold still represents the ultimate form of payment in the world.
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Credit-default swaps, I think, have serious problems associated with them.
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Unfortunately, Senator, nobody knows where the next innovative idea is coming from.
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This is the reason that history has not dealt kindly with the aftermath of protracted periods of low risk premiums.
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There is no safe store of value. Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the hidden confiscation of wealth.
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It keeps interest rates lower than they otherwise would be and frees savings to finance increases in the capital stock, thereby boosting productivity and real incomes.
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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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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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The Iraq War is largely about oil.
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Gold stands in the way of this insidious process. It stands as a protector of property rights.
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Productivity is notoriously difficult to predict.
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Was sort of intellectually shocked. Contagion is the critical phenomenon which causes the thing to fall apart.
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The number one problem in today’s generation and economy is the lack of financial literacy.
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Yet deregulation set the stage for an enormous wave of creative destruction in the 1980s.
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Corruption, embezzlement, fraud, these are all characteristics which exist everywhere.
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Regulation – which is based on force and fear – undermines the moral base of business dealings. It becomes cheaper to bribe a building inspector than to meet his standards of construction. Protection of the consumer by regulation is thus illusory.
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It’s hard to overemphasize how important Ford’s deregulation was. True, most of the benefits took years to unfold-rail freight rates, for example hardly budged at first.
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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.
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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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It is regrettably the way human nature functions, whether we like it or not. What successful economies do is keep it to a minimum.
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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.
ALAN GREENSPAN