Any onset of increased investor caution elevates risk premiums and, as a consequence, lowers asset values and promotes the liquidation of the debt that supported higher asset prices.
ALAN GREENSPANA decline in the national housing price level would need to be substantial to trigger a significant rise in foreclosures, because the vast majority of homeowners have built up substantial equity in their homes despite large mortgage.
More Alan Greenspan Quotes
-
-
Whatever you tax you get less of.
ALAN GREENSPAN -
If one grasps this, one has no difficulty in understanding the statists’ antagonism toward the gold standard.
ALAN GREENSPAN -
Excessive optimism sows the seeds of its own reversal.
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 -
I have one other issue I’d like to throw on the table. I hesitate to do it, but let me tell you some of the issues that are involved here.
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 -
In the process we have created [a] privileged elite whose incomes are being supported at non-competitively high levels by immigration quotas on skilled professionals.
ALAN GREENSPAN -
Gold stands in the way of this insidious process. It stands as a protector of property rights.
ALAN GREENSPAN -
I’m a plain soap kind of guy.
ALAN GREENSPAN -
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.
ALAN GREENSPAN -
Without calling the overall national issue a bubble, it’s pretty clear that it’s an unsustainable underlying pattern.
ALAN GREENSPAN -
These days, even out of office, I still read economic reports.
ALAN GREENSPAN -
People dont realize that we cannot forecast the future. What we can do is have probabilities of what causes what, but thats as far as we go. And Ive had a very successful career as a forecaster, starting in 1948 forward.
ALAN GREENSPAN -
Amateurs want to be right. Professionals want to make money.
ALAN GREENSPAN -
American consumers might benefit if lenders provided greater mortgage product alternatives to the traditional fixed-rate mortgage.
ALAN GREENSPAN