Alan Greenspan famous quotes

I have found no greater satisfaction than achieving success through honest dealing and strict adherence to the view that, for you to gain, those you deal with should gain as well.
-- Alan Greenspan

#Business #Greatness #Views

Any informed borrower is simply less vulnerable to fraud and abuse.
-- Alan Greenspan

#Success #Money #Business

Gold still represents the ultimate form of payment in the world. Fiat money in extremis is accepted by nobody. Gold is always accepted.
-- Alan Greenspan

#Gold #World #Accepted

I guess I should warn you, if I turn out to be particularly clear, you've probably misunderstood what I've said.
-- Alan Greenspan

#Misunderstood #Investing #Should

The number one problem in today's generation and economy is the lack of financial literacy.
-- Alan Greenspan

#Numbers #Generations

But rules cannot substitute for character.
-- Alan Greenspan

#Character #Substitutes

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

#Talking #Today #Economy

Rules cannot take the place of character.
-- Alan Greenspan

#Character

I do not deny that many appear to have succeeded in a material way by cutting corners and by manipulating associates, both in their professional and in their personal lives. But material success is possible in this world and far more satisfying when it comes without exploiting others.
-- Alan Greenspan

#Success #Business #Cutting

The true measure of a career is to be able to be content, even proud, that you succeeded through your own endeavors without leaving a trail of casualties in your wake.
-- Alan Greenspan

#Happiness #Careers #Leaving

In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation. There is no safe store of value.
-- Alan Greenspan

#Safety #Gold #Saving

If all currencies are moving up or down together, the question is: relative to what? Gold is the canary in the coal mine. It signals problems with respect to currency markets. Central banks should pay attention to it.
-- Alan Greenspan

#Moving #Together #Gold

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: the increased flexibility of our economy, which has fostered our extraordinary resilience to shocks.
-- Alan Greenspan

#Resilience #Fiscal Policy #May

What we have found over the years in the marketplace is that derivatives have been an extraordinarily useful vehicle to transfer risk from those who shouldn't be taking it to those who are willing to and are capable of doing so.
-- Alan Greenspan

#Business #Years #Risk

We cannot rule out a situation in which a preemptive policy tightening becomes necessary, ... Such caution seems especially warranted with regard to the sharp rise in equity prices during the past two years. These gains have obviously raised questions of sustainability.
-- Alan Greenspan

#Past #Years #Two

There are no easy choices. Easy choices are long gone.
-- Alan Greenspan

#Long #Choices #Gone

Nor can private counterparties restrict supplies of gold, another commodity whose derivatives are often traded over-the-counter, where central banks stand ready to lease gold in increasing quantities should the price rise.
-- Alan Greenspan

#Gold #Derivatives #Commodity

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.
-- Alan Greenspan

#Clouds #Numbers #United States

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
-- Alan Greenspan

#Unique #Expansion #Way

The gut-feel of the 55-year old trader is more important than the mathematical elegance of the 25-year old genius.
-- Alan Greenspan

#Years #Important #Genius

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.
-- Alan Greenspan

#Momentum #Financial #Economy

We can guarantee cash benefits as far out and at whatever size you like, but we cannot guarantee their purchasing power.
-- Alan Greenspan

#Guarantees #Benefits #Cash

History has not dealt kindly with the aftermath of protracted periods of low risk premiums.
-- Alan Greenspan

#Risk #Aftermath #Economy

I'm not denying that monopolies are terrible things, but I am denying that it is readily easy to resolve them through legislation of that nature.
-- Alan Greenspan

#Easy #Legislation #Monopoly

It's a bubble. It has to have intrinsic value. You have to really stretch your imagination to infer what the intrinsic value of Bitcoin is. I haven't been able to do it. Maybe somebody else can.
-- Alan Greenspan

#Imagination #Able #Bitcoin

Productivity is notoriously difficult to predict.
-- Alan Greenspan

#Difficult #Productivity

The process of innovation is, of course, never ending.
-- Alan Greenspan

#Innovation #Process

And whatever their publicized angst over Saddam Hussein's 'weapons of mass destruction,' American and British authorities were also concerned about violence in an area that harbors a resource indispensable for the functioning of the word economy. ... I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.
-- Alan Greenspan

#War #Oil #Iraq

I was a fairly good amateur musician, and I was an average professional. But the one thing I saw was that the big band business was fading.
-- Alan Greenspan

#Average #Musician #Band

Revolutions are something you see only in retrospect.
-- Alan Greenspan

#Retrospect #Revolution

It seems superfluous to constrain trading in some of the newer derivatives and other innovative financial contracts of the past decade. The worst have failed; investors no longer fund them and are not likely to in the future.
-- Alan Greenspan

#Business #Past #Derivatives

Amateurs want to be right. Professionals want to make money.
-- Alan Greenspan

#Want #Making Money

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

#Political #Groups #Social

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. Yet deregulation set the stage for an enormous wave of creative destruction in the 1980s:...
-- Alan Greenspan

#Years #Creative #Important

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.
-- Alan Greenspan

#Diversity #United States #May

Without calling the overall national issue a bubble, it's pretty clear that it's an unsustainable underlying pattern.
-- Alan Greenspan

#Issues #Calling #Patterns

Cash is available and we should use that in larger amounts, as is necessary, to solve the problems of the stress of this.
-- Alan Greenspan

#Stress #Use #Cash

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

#Believe #Thinking #Law

If you think you understand what I am saying you do not understand what I am saying.
-- Alan Greenspan

#Thinking #Economist

Corruption, embezzlement, fraud, these are all characteristics which exist everywhere. It is regrettably the way human nature functions, whether we like it or not. What successful economies do is keep it to a minimum. No one has ever eliminated any of that stuff.
-- Alan Greenspan

#Successful #Stuff #Way

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. The number of mistakes I have made are just awesome. There is no number large enough to account for that.
-- Alan Greenspan

#Mistake #Successful #Careers

You can't have the capitalist system if an increasing number of people think it is unjust.
-- Alan Greenspan

#Thinking #Numbers #People

Fear and euphoria are dominant forces, and fear is many multiples the size of euphoria. Bubbles go up very slowly as euphoria builds. Then fear hits, and it comes down very sharply. When I started to look at that, I was sort of intellectually shocked. Contagion is the critical phenomenon which causes the thing to fall apart.
-- Alan Greenspan

#Fall #Looks #Causes

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.
-- Alan Greenspan

#Zero #United States #Debt

History demonstrates that participants in financial markets are susceptible to waves of optimism. Excessive optimism shows the seeds of its own reversal in the form of imbalances that tend to grow over time.
-- Alan Greenspan

#Optimism #Imbalance #Financial

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.
-- Alan Greenspan

#Integrity #Arbitrary #Guarantees

In general, corruption tends to exist whenever governments have favors to extend, or something to sell.
-- Alan Greenspan

#Government #Favors #Corruption

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

#Successful #Coins #Tossers

When trust is lost, a nation's ability to transact business is palpably undermined.
-- Alan Greenspan

#Lost #Ability

The free lunch has still to be invented.
-- Alan Greenspan

#Lunch #Stills

The Iraq War is largely about oil.
-- Alan Greenspan

#War #Oil #Iraq

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.
-- Alan Greenspan

#Gains #Action #Terrorism

The more flexible an economy, the greater its ability to self-correct in response to inevitable, often unanticipated, disturbances and thus to contain the size and consequences of cyclical imbalances.
-- Alan Greenspan

#Self #Imbalance #Size

A decline in the national housing price level would need to be substantial to trigger a significant rise in foreclosures, because the vast majority of homeowners have built up substantial equity in their homes despite large mortgage-market financed withdrawals of home equity in recent years.
-- Alan Greenspan

#Home #Years #Majority

The need for values is inbred. Their content is not.
-- Alan Greenspan

#Needs #Inbreds #Values

I cannot conceive of a politically feasible solution to this problem which will overdo cutting the deficit, where overdoing means harming the economy. It might be technically possible, but it is not realistic.
-- Alan Greenspan

#Mean #Cutting #Might

American consumers might benefit if lenders provided greater mortgage product alternatives to the traditional fixed-rate mortgage.
-- Alan Greenspan

#Alternatives #Benefits #Might

Look, I'm very much in favor of tax cuts, but not with borrowed money. And the problem that we've gotten into in recent years is spending programs with borrowed money, tax cuts with borrowed money, and at the end of the day that proves disastrous. And my view is I don't think we can play subtle policy here.
-- Alan Greenspan

#Cutting #Thinking #Views

Regulators have not been able to achieve the level of future clarity required to act pre-emptively. The problem is not lack of regulation but unrealistic expectations. What we confront in reality is uncertainty, some of it frighteningly so ...
-- Alan Greenspan

#Ignorance #Reality #Expectations

How do we know when irrational exuberance has unduly escalated asset values?
-- Alan Greenspan

#Memorable #Assets #Irrational

I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.
-- Alan Greenspan

#War #Oil #Iraq

Whatever you tax you get less of.
-- Alan Greenspan

#Economics #Taxes

Protectionism will do little to create jobs and if foreigners retaliate, we will surely lose jobs.
-- Alan Greenspan

#Jobs #Littles #Economics

Crony capitalism is essentially a condition in which... public officials are giving favours to people in the private sector in payment of political favours.
-- Alan Greenspan

#Dark #People #Giving

It has been my experience that competency in mathematics, both in numerical manipulations and in understanding its conceptual foundations, enhances a person's ability to handle the more ambiguous and qualitative relationships that dominate our day-to-day financial decision-making
-- Alan Greenspan

#Decision #Understanding #Foundation

Given our inevitably incomplete knowledge about key structural aspects of an everchanging economy and the sometimes asymmetric costs or benefits of particular outcomes, a central bank needs to consider not only the most likely future path for the economy but also the distribution of possible outcomes about that path. The decision makers then need to reach judgment about the probabilities, costs and benefits of the various possible outcomes under alternative choices for policy.
-- Alan Greenspan

#Keys #Choices #Decision

Indeed, better risk management may be the only truly necessary element of success in banking.
-- Alan Greenspan

#Risk #Banking #Elements

It is decidedly not true that "nice guys finish last," as that highly original American baseball philosopher, Leo Durocher, was alleged to have said.
-- Alan Greenspan

#Success #Baseball #Business

Greenspan, who knew so much more than most, knew far less than most supposed ...
-- Alan Greenspan

#Ignorance

Senator, we are groping for understanding, the knowledge you assume I possess doesn't exist' - 'The only effective regulation lies in the propensity of customers to choose alternatives, of investors to move their funds elsewhere and of labour to acquire technical skills' - 'Senator, if I seem clear to you, you must have misunderstood me' - 'Unfortunately, Senator, nobody knows where the next innovative idea is coming from. Political decisions are never random and will always lose out to innovative alternatives
-- Alan Greenspan

#Lying #Moving #Ignorance

Significantly opening up immigration to skilled workers solves two problems. The companies could hire the educated workers they need. And those workers would compete with high-income people, driving more income equality.
-- Alan Greenspan

#Two #Opening Up #People

I was a good amateur but only an average professional. I soon realized that there was a limit to how far I could rise in the music business, so I left the band and enrolled at New York University.
-- Alan Greenspan

#Success #New York #Business

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.
-- Alan Greenspan

#Wall #Government #Becoming

Anything that we can do to raise personal savings is very much in the interest of this country.
-- Alan Greenspan

#Country #Philosophy #Political