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 GREENSPANThis is the reason that history has not dealt kindly with the aftermath of protracted periods of low risk premiums.
More Alan Greenspan Quotes
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Before I met Ayn Rand, I was a logical positivist, and accordingly,
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The process of innovation is, of course, never ending.
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History cannot be reduced to a set of statistics and probabilities.
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Now, I only play very occasionally, and in fact, more piano than clarinet or sax.
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If all currencies are moving up or down together, the question is: relative to what? Gold is the canary in the coal mine.
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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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Credit-default swaps, I think, have serious problems associated with them.
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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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Without calling the overall national issue a bubble, it’s pretty clear that it’s an unsustainable underlying pattern.
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Derivatives have permitted the unbundling of financial risks.
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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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The guiding purpose of the government regulator is to prevent rather than to create something.
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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 more flexible an economy, the greater its ability to self-correct in response to inevitable, often unanticipated, disturbances and thus to contain the size and consequences of cyclical imbalances.
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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.
ALAN GREENSPAN