By far the most significant event in finance during the past decade has been the extraordinary development and expansion of financial derivatives.
ALAN GREENSPANDerivatives have permitted the unbundling of financial risks.
More Alan Greenspan Quotes
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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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We as central bankers need not be concerned if a collapsing financial asset bubble does not threaten to impair the real economy, its production, jobs and price stability.
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I was a fairly good amateur musician, and I was an average professional. But the one thing I saw was that the big band business was fading.
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Protectionism will do little to create jobs and if foreigners retaliate, we will surely lose jobs.
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Regulators have not been able to achieve the level of future clarity required to act pre-emptively.
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Developing protectionism regarding trade and our reluctance to place fiscal policy on a more sustainable path are threatening what may well be our most valued policy asset.
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[Republicans] swapped principle for power. They ended up with neither. They deserved to lose.
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If we allow terrorism to undermine our freedom of action, we could reverse at least part of the palpable gains achieved by postwar globalization. It is incumbent upon us not to allow that to happen.
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I guess I should warn you, if I turn out to be particularly clear, you’ve probably misunderstood what I’ve said.
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Enhances a person’s ability to handle the more ambiguous and qualitative relationships that dominate our day-to-day financial decision-making
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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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I’m a plain soap kind of guy.
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There is nothing to guarantee the superior judgment, knowledge, and integrity of an inspector or a bureaucrat-and the deadly consequences of entrusting him with arbitrary power are obvious.
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The free lunch has still to be invented.
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I don’t know where the stock market is going, but I will say this, that if it continues higher, this will do more to stimulate the economy than anything we’ve been talking about today or anything anybody else was talking about.
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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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Stripped of its academic jargon, the welfare state is nothing more than a mechanism by which governments confiscate the wealth of the productive members of a society to support a wide variety of welfare schemes.
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I don’t think it’s possible for the Fed to end its easy-money policies in a trouble-free manner.
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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’m always amazed that my wife can handle different subjects – one day politics, the next day foreign policy.
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I’ve always argued that this country has benefited immensely from the fact that we draw people from all over the world.
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If prices go down, we will have problems – problems in the sense of spillover to other areas.
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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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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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We will have more crises and none of them will look like this because no two crises have anything in common except human nature.
ALAN GREENSPAN -
Political decisions are never random and will always lose out to innovative alternatives.
ALAN GREENSPAN