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 GREENSPANHistory demonstrates that participants in financial markets are susceptible to waves of optimism.
More Alan Greenspan Quotes
-
-
Gold, unlike all other commodities, is a currency…and the major thrust in the demand for gold is not for jewelry.
ALAN GREENSPAN -
It is regrettably the way human nature functions, whether we like it or not. What successful economies do is keep it to a minimum.
ALAN GREENSPAN -
The guiding purpose of the government regulator is to prevent rather than to create something.
ALAN GREENSPAN -
We ought to be opening up our borders to skilled labour from all parts of the world because [the state of the world is as follows: ].
ALAN GREENSPAN -
Clearly, sustained low inflation implies less uncertainty about the future, and lower risk premiums imply higher prices of stocks and other earning assets.
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 -
Derivatives have permitted the unbundling of financial risks.
ALAN GREENSPAN -
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.
ALAN GREENSPAN -
It has been my experience that competency in mathematics, both in numerical manipulations and in understanding its conceptual foundations.
ALAN GREENSPAN -
The probability of ten consecutive heads is 0.1 percent; thus, when you have millions of coin tossers, or investors, in the end there will be thousands of very successful practitioners of coin tossing, or stock picking.
ALAN GREENSPAN -
Yet deregulation set the stage for an enormous wave of creative destruction in the 1980s.
ALAN GREENSPAN -
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 -
This decade is strewn with examples of bright people who thought they built a better mousetrap that could consistently extract abnormal returns from the financial markets.
ALAN GREENSPAN -
The use of a growing array of derivatives and the related application of more-sophisticated approaches to measuring and managing risk are key factors underpinning the greater resilience of our largest financial institutions…
ALAN GREENSPAN -
No matter how skillful the trading scheme, over the long haul, abnormal returns are sustained only through abnormal exposure to risk.
ALAN GREENSPAN -
Significantly opening up immigration to skilled workers solves two problems.
ALAN GREENSPAN -
Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholders’ equity are in a state of shocked disbelief.
ALAN GREENSPAN -
Anyone willing to do what is required to become president of the United States is thereby barred from taking that office. I’m only half joking
ALAN GREENSPAN -
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 GREENSPAN -
Regulation of derivatives transactions that are privately negotiated by professionals is unnecessary.
ALAN GREENSPAN -
We need, in effect, to make the phantom ‘lock-boxes’ around the trust fund real.
ALAN GREENSPAN -
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.
ALAN GREENSPAN -
Fear and euphoria are dominant forces, and fear is many multiples the size of euphoria. Bubbles go up very slowly as euphoria builds.
ALAN GREENSPAN -
I came to a stark realization: chronic surpluses could be almost as destabilizing as chronic deficits.
ALAN GREENSPAN -
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.
ALAN GREENSPAN -
I’m a better economist than I was a sax player.
ALAN GREENSPAN