Regulators have not been able to achieve the level of future clarity required to act pre-emptively.
ALAN GREENSPANWas sort of intellectually shocked. Contagion is the critical phenomenon which causes the thing to fall apart.
More Alan Greenspan Quotes
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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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Productivity is notoriously difficult to predict.
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In general, corruption tends to exist whenever governments have favors to extend, or something to sell.
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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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It seems superfluous to constrain trading in some of the newer derivatives and other innovative financial contracts of the past decade.
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I’m a better economist than I was a sax player.
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Any informed borrower is simply less vulnerable to fraud and abuse.
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I don’t think it’s possible for the Fed to end its easy-money policies in a trouble-free manner.
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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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No one has ever eliminated any of that stuff.
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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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Now, I only play very occasionally, and in fact, more piano than clarinet or sax.
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If you think you understand what I am saying you do not understand what I am saying.
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The number one problem in today’s generation and economy is the lack of financial literacy.
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Rules cannot take the place of character.
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If prices go down, we will have problems – problems in the sense of spillover to other areas.
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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 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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The need for values is inbred. Their content is not.
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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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Since I’ve become a central banker, I’ve learned to mumble with great incoherence.
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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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Clearly, sustained low inflation implies less uncertainty about the future, and lower risk premiums imply higher prices of stocks and other earning assets.
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I was raising the question on the side with Governor Mullins of what would happen if the Treasury sold a little gold in this market.
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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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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.
ALAN GREENSPAN