In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation.
ALAN GREENSPANDeveloping protectionism regarding trade and our reluctance to place fiscal policy on a more sustainable path are threatening what may well be our most valued policy asset.
More Alan Greenspan Quotes
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But rules cannot substitute for character.
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Regulation – which is based on force and fear – undermines the moral base of business dealings. It becomes cheaper to bribe a building inspector than to meet his standards of construction. Protection of the consumer by regulation is thus illusory.
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Institutions of the newer participants in global finance had not been tested, until recently…recent crisis have underscored certain financial structure vulnerabilities that are not readily assuaged in the short run.
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Enhances a person’s ability to handle the more ambiguous and qualitative relationships that dominate our day-to-day financial decision-making
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I have long argued that paying down the national debt is beneficial for the economy.
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Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the ‘hidden’ confiscation of wealth.
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It is regrettably the way human nature functions, whether we like it or not. What successful economies do is keep it to a minimum.
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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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Although the outlook is clouded by a number of uncertainties, the central tendencies of the projections .. imply continued good economic performance in the United States.
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The gut-feel of the 55-year old trader is more important than the mathematical elegance of the 25-year old genius.
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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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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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How do we know when irrational exuberance has unduly escalated asset values?
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The abandonment of the gold standard made it possible for the welfare statists to use the banking system as a means to an unlimited expansion of credit.
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And whatever their publicized angst over Saddam Hussein’s ‘weapons of mass destruction.
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These days, even out of office, I still read economic reports.
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The recent evidence increasingly suggests that an economic expansion is already well under way, although an array of influences unique to this business cycle seems likely to moderate its speed.
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All taxes are a drag on economic growth. It’s only a question of degree.
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Developing protectionism regarding trade and our reluctance to place fiscal policy on a more sustainable path are threatening what may well be our most valued policy asset.
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There’s an interesting question here because if the gold price broke in that context, the thermometer would not be just a measuring tool. It would basically affect the underlying psychology.
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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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Without calling the overall national issue a bubble, it’s pretty clear that it’s an unsustainable underlying pattern.
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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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Anything that we can do to raise personal savings is very much in the interest of this country.
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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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Now, I only play very occasionally, and in fact, more piano than clarinet or sax.
ALAN GREENSPAN