Fear and euphoria are dominant forces, and fear is many multiples the size of euphoria. Bubbles go up very slowly as euphoria builds.
ALAN GREENSPANIn the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation. There is no safe store of value.
More Alan Greenspan Quotes
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Gold stands in the way of this insidious process. It stands as a protector of property rights.
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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 not denying that monopolies are terrible things, but I am denying that it is readily easy to resolve them through legislation of that nature.
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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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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.
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Many of those who purchased their residence more than a year ago have equity buffers in their homes adequate to withstand any price decline other than a very deep one.
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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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You can’t have the capitalist system if an increasing number of people think it is unjust.
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Capitalism is based on self-interest and self-esteem; it holds integrity and trustworthiness as cardinal virtues and makes them pay off in the marketplace, thus demanding that men survive by means of virtue, not vices.
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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.
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Yet deregulation set the stage for an enormous wave of creative destruction in the 1980s.
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The need for values is inbred. Their content is not.
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Gold still represents the ultimate form of payment in the world.
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We need, in effect, to make the phantom ‘lock-boxes’ around the trust fund real.
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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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Crony capitalism is essentially a condition in which… public officials are giving favours to people in the private sector in payment of political favours.
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The true measure of a career is to be able to be content, even proud, that you succeeded through your own endeavors without leaving a trail of casualties in your wake.
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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.
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The number one problem in today’s generation and economy is the lack of financial literacy.
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I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.
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Well, you probably will always believe there should be laws against fraud, and I don’t think there is any need for a law against fraud.
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Was sort of intellectually shocked. Contagion is the critical phenomenon which causes the thing to fall apart.
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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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I have long argued that paying down the national debt is beneficial for the economy.
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They then need to reach a judgment about the probabilities, costs, and benefits of the various possible outcomes under alternative choices for policy.
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Some succeed for a time. But while there may occasionally be mis-configurations among market prices that allow abnormal returns, they do not persist.
ALAN GREENSPAN