Alan Greenspan Quotes

55 Sourced Quotes

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

Alan Greenspan
The resolution of our current account deficit and household debt burdens does not strike me as overly worrisome, but that is certainly not the case for our fiscal deficit, which, according to the Congressional Budget Office, will rise significantly as the baby boomers start to retire in 2008. Our fiscal prospects are, in my judgment, a significant obstacle to long-term stability because the budget deficit is not readily subject to correction by market forces that stabilize other imbalances.

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

Alan Greenspan
History suggests that they [valuations] also reflect waves of optimism and pessimism that can be set off by small exogenous events.

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

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

Alan Greenspan
Since becoming a central banker, I have learned to mumble with great incoherence. If I seem unduly clear to you, you must have misunderstood what I said.

Alan Greenspan
[There are] signs of froth in some local markets where home prices seem to have risen to unsustainable levels.

Alan Greenspan
Rising interest rates have been advertised for so long and in so many places that anyone who has not appropriately hedged this position by now obviously is desirous of losing money.

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

Alan Greenspan
Of course, shedding the debt burden would be a happy development for our country, but it would nevertheless pose a big dilemma for the Fed. Our primary lever of monetary policy was buying and selling treasury securities-Uncle Sam's IOU's. But as the debt was paid down, those securities would grow scarce, leaving the Fed in need of a new set of assets to effect monetary policy.

Alan Greenspan
Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholder's equity – myself especially – are in a state of shocked disbelief.

Alan Greenspan
Modern dynamic economies do not stay still long enough to allow for an accurate reading of their underlying structures.

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

Alan Greenspan
Treasury Secretary Brady didn't like the Fed either. He and the president were friends and had a lot in common-both were wealthy, Yale educated patricians and members of Skull and Bones.

Alan Greenspan
The reason there is very little support for the gold standard is the consequences of those types of market adjustments are not considered to be appropriate in the 20th and 21st century. I am one of the rare people who have still some nostalgic view about the old gold standard, as you know, but I must tell you, I am in a very small minority among my colleagues on that issue.

Alan Greenspan
We generally did not talk about the stock market very much at the Fed.

Alan Greenspan
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?

Alan Greenspan
I really didn't get it until very late in 2005 and 2006.

Alan Greenspan
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
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.

Alan Greenspan
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
The guiding purpose of the government regulator is to prevent rather than to create something.

Alan Greenspan
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

Alan Greenspan
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
An area in which more rather than less government involvement is needed, in my judgment, is the rooting out of fraud. It is the bane of any market system.

Alan Greenspan