If you think you understand what I am saying you do not understand what I am saying.
ALAN GREENSPANBut how do we know when irrational exuberance has unduly escalated asset values, which then become subject to unexpected and prolonged contractions as they have in Japan over the past decade?
More Alan Greenspan Quotes
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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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What an ideology is is a conceptual framework with the way people deal with reality.
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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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Senator, if I seem clear to you, you must have misunderstood me’.
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And she always has so much fun doing it. We make a good team.
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American and British authorities were also concerned about violence in an area that harbors a resource indispensable for the functioning of the word economy.
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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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But how do we know when irrational exuberance has unduly escalated asset values, which then become subject to unexpected and prolonged contractions as they have in Japan over the past decade?
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Since I’ve become a central banker, I’ve learned to mumble with great incoherence.
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Clearly, sustained low inflation implies less uncertainty about the future, and lower risk premiums imply higher prices of stocks and other earning assets.
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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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We cannot rule out a situation in which a preemptive policy tightening becomes necessary.
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The current financial crisis in the US is likely to be judged in retrospect as the most wrenching since the end of the Second World War.
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As long as we issue fiat currency, I see no alternative to a legal tender law.
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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.
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Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholders’ equity are in a state of shocked disbelief.
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The increased flexibility of our economy, which has fostered our extraordinary resilience to shocks.
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The only effective regulation lies in the propensity of customers to choose alternatives, of investors to move their funds elsewhere and of labour to acquire technical skills’.
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In general, corruption tends to exist whenever governments have favors to extend, or something to sell.
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…our market system depends critically on trust-trust in the word of our colleagues and trust in the word of those with whom we do business.
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Before I met Ayn Rand, I was a logical positivist, and accordingly,
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Amateurs want to be right. Professionals want to make money.
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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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The gut-feel of the 55-year old trader is more important than the mathematical elegance of the 25-year old genius.
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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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If I seem unduly clear to you, you must have misunderstood what I said.
ALAN GREENSPAN