Yet deregulation set the stage for an enormous wave of creative destruction in the 1980s.
ALAN GREENSPANHistory demonstrates that participants in financial markets are susceptible to waves of optimism.
More Alan Greenspan Quotes
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We can guarantee cash benefits as far out and at whatever size you like, but we cannot guarantee their purchasing power.
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While these tendencies were no doubt in train in the “old,” pre-1990s economy, they accelerated over the past decade as a number of technologies with their roots in the cumulative innovations of the past half-century began to yield dramatic economic returns.
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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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American consumers might benefit if lenders provided greater mortgage product alternatives to the traditional fixed-rate mortgage.
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Unfortunately, Senator, nobody knows where the next innovative idea is coming from.
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Fiat money in extremis is accepted by nobody. Gold is always accepted.
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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.
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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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Excessive optimism sows the seeds of its own reversal.
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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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If I seem unduly clear to you, you must have misunderstood what I said.
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Senator, if I seem clear to you, you must have misunderstood me’.
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The arts develop skills and habits of mind that are important for workers in the new economy of ideas.
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The economy is turning, and credit comes in with a lag, .. To the extent that a number of small firms are finding it difficult to get the credit they need at a price they can afford, that’s likely to change for the better.
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The process of innovation is, of course, never ending.
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Given our inevitably incomplete knowledge about key structural aspects of our ever-changing economy and the sometimes asymmetric costs or benefits of particular outcomes, a central bank.
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As long as we issue fiat currency, I see no alternative to a legal tender law.
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I believe that the general growth in large [financial] institutions have occurred in the context of an underlying structure of markets in which many of the larger risks are dramatically — I should say, fully — hedged.
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History has not dealt kindly with the aftermath of protracted periods of low risk premiums.
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Indeed, better risk management may be the only truly necessary element of success in banking.
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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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Gold stands in the way of this insidious process. It stands as a protector of property rights.
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The Iraq War is largely about oil.
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While local economies may experience significant price imbalances, a national severe price distortion seems most unlikely in the United States, given its size and diversity.
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In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation.
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The problem is not lack of regulation but unrealistic expectations. What we confront in reality is uncertainty, some of it frighteningly so…
ALAN GREENSPAN