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 GREENSPANAmerican consumers might benefit if lenders provided greater mortgage product alternatives to the traditional fixed-rate mortgage.
More Alan Greenspan Quotes
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History has not dealt kindly with the aftermath of protracted periods of low risk premiums.
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The need for values is inbred. Their content is not.
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We may be in a rapidly evolving international financial system with all the bells and whistles of the so-called new economy. But the old-economy rules of prudence are as formidable as ever. We violate them at our own peril.
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Amateurs want to be right. Professionals want to make money.
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It’s hard to overemphasize how important Ford’s deregulation was. True, most of the benefits took years to unfold-rail freight rates, for example hardly budged at first.
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Improvements in lending practices driven by information technology have enabled lenders to reach out to households with previously unrecognized borrowing capacities.
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Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the ‘hidden’ confiscation of wealth.
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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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Significantly opening up immigration to skilled workers solves two problems.
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In an economy that already has lost some momentum, one must remain alert to the possibility that greater caution and weakening asset values in financial markets could signal or precipitate an excessive softening in household and business spending.
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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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The United States can pay any debt it has because we can always print money to do that. So there is zero probability of default.
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I’m a plain soap kind of guy.
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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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Everyone has one. You have to, to exist you need an ideology. The question is whether it is accurate or not.
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If we were to do that we would increase the supply of skilled workers that our schools have been unable to create and as a consequence of that we would lower the average wage of skills and reduce the degree of income inequality in this country.
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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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Need to consider not only the most likely future path for the economy but also the distribution of possible outcomes about that path.
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Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholders’ equity are in a state of shocked disbelief.
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I didn’t believe in absolutes, moral or otherwise. If I couldn’t prove a proposition with facts and figures, it was without merit.
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By far the most significant event in finance during the past decade has been the extraordinary development and expansion of financial derivatives.
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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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I must say, I never expected to see the day where I would be talking about anything other than reducing the debt, I’m running into the tyranny of zero, which is where you can’t reduce (the debt) any more
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The free lunch has still to be invented.
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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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But material success is possible in this world and far more satisfying when it comes without exploiting others.
ALAN GREENSPAN