Gold stands in the way of this insidious process. It stands as a protector of property rights.
ALAN GREENSPANGiven 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.
More Alan Greenspan Quotes
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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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History cannot be reduced to a set of statistics and probabilities.
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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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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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The problem is not lack of regulation but unrealistic expectations. What we confront in reality is uncertainty, some of it frighteningly so…
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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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We can see that in the inverse relationship exhibited by price/earnings ratios and the rate of inflation in the past.
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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.
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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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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
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I’ve been in and out of Wall Street since 1949, and I’ve never seen the type of animosity between government and Wall Street. And I’m not sure where it comes from, but I suspect it’s got to do with a general schism in this society which is really becoming ever more destructive.
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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.
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Protectionism will do little to create jobs and if foreigners retaliate, we will surely lose jobs.
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Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the confiscation of wealth.If I seem unduly clear to you, you must have misunderstood what I said.
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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.
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Anything that we can do to raise personal savings is very much in the interest of this country.
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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.
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Revolutions are something you see only in retrospect.
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Now, I only play very occasionally, and in fact, more piano than clarinet or sax.
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Significantly opening up immigration to skilled workers solves two problems.
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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.
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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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Fiat money in extremis is accepted by nobody. Gold is always accepted.
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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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Unfortunately, Senator, nobody knows where the next innovative idea is coming from.
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If you get beyond the political rhetoric [and assembled a group to solve Social Security] it would take them 15 minutes. It would take them 15 minutes only because 10 minutes was used for pleasantries.
ALAN GREENSPAN