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 GREENSPANIf you get beyond the political rhetoric [and assembled a group to solve Social Security] it would take them 15 minutes. It would take them 15 minutes only because 10 minutes was used for pleasantries.
More Alan Greenspan Quotes
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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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Without calling the overall national issue a bubble, it’s pretty clear that it’s an unsustainable underlying pattern.
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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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I didn’t believe in absolutes, moral or otherwise. If I couldn’t prove a proposition with facts and figures, it was without merit.
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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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Yet deregulation set the stage for an enormous wave of creative destruction in the 1980s.
ALAN GREENSPAN -
I love facts and figures. It’s like following a detective story, piecing together what’s going on in the economy.
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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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Skilled shortages in America exist because we are shielding our skilled labor force from world competition. [Visa quotas] have been substituted for the wage pricing mechanism.
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I do not deny that many appear to have succeeded in a material way by cutting corners and by manipulating associates, both in their professional and in their personal lives.
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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.
ALAN GREENSPAN -
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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This is the reason that history has not dealt kindly with the aftermath of protracted periods of low risk premiums.
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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.
ALAN GREENSPAN -
Everyone has one. You have to, to exist you need an ideology. The question is whether it is accurate or not.
ALAN GREENSPAN