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.
ALAN GREENSPANAny informed borrower is simply less vulnerable to fraud and abuse.
More Alan Greenspan Quotes
-
-
Although the outlook is clouded by a number of uncertainties, the central tendencies of the projections .. imply continued good economic performance in the United States.
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 -
Revolutions are something you see only in retrospect.
ALAN GREENSPAN -
Amateurs want to be right. Professionals want to make money.
ALAN GREENSPAN -
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.
ALAN GREENSPAN -
We cannot rule out a situation in which a preemptive policy tightening becomes necessary.
ALAN GREENSPAN -
At the risk of some oversimplification, if the skill composition of our work force meshed fully with the needs of our increasingly complex capital-stock, wage-skill differentials would be stable.
ALAN GREENSPAN -
I love facts and figures. It’s like following a detective story, piecing together what’s going on in the economy.
ALAN GREENSPAN -
I didn’t believe in absolutes, moral or otherwise. If I couldn’t prove a proposition with facts and figures, it was without merit.
ALAN GREENSPAN -
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 GREENSPAN -
I made a mistake in presuming that the self-interests of organisations, specifically banks and others, were such that they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders and their equity in the firms.
ALAN GREENSPAN -
Regulation of derivatives transactions that are privately negotiated by professionals is unnecessary.
ALAN GREENSPAN -
It seems superfluous to constrain trading in some of the newer derivatives and other innovative financial contracts of the past decade.
ALAN GREENSPAN -
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’.
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