Alan Greenspan Quotes

55 Sourced Quotes

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
We are obviously all hurt by inflation. Everybody is hurt by inflation. If you really wanted to examine who percentage-wise is hurt the most in their incomes, it is the Wall Street brokers. I mean their incomes have gone down the most.

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

Alan Greenspan
Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the confiscation of wealth.

Alan Greenspan
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. It is this superlatively moral system that the welfare statists propose to improve upon by means of preventative law, snooping bureaucrats, and the chronic goad of fear.

Alan Greenspan
From the development of the textile loom two centuries ago to today's Internet, output per hour has increased fifty fold.

Alan Greenspan
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
That said, there can be little doubt that exceptionally low interest rates on ten-year Treasury notes, and hence on home mortgages, have been a major factor in the recent surge of homebuilding and home turnover, and especially in the steep climb in home prices. Although a 'bubble' in home prices for the nation as a whole does not appear likely, there do appear to be, at a minimum, signs of froth in some local markets where home prices seem to have risen to unsustainable levels.

Alan Greenspan
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
It did not go without notice that Ayn Rand stood beside me as I took the oath of office in the presence of President Ford in the Oval Office. Ayn Rand and I remained close until she died in 1982, and I'm grateful for the influence she had on my life. I was intellectually limited until I met her.

Alan Greenspan
I was aware that the loosening of mortgage credit terms for subprime borrowers increased financial risk. But I believed then, as now, that the benefits of broadened home ownership are worth the risk.

Alan Greenspan
An infectious greed seemed to grip much of our business community.... It is not that humans have become any more greedy than in generations past. It is that the avenues to express greed have grown so enormously.

Alan Greenspan
Once stock prices reach the point at which it is hard to value them by logical methodology, stocks will be bought as they were in the late 1920s not for investment but to be unloaded at a still higher price. The ensuing break could be disastrous because panic psychology cannot be summarily altered or reversed by easing money policies.

Alan Greenspan
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
An almost hysterical antagonism toward the gold standard is one issue which unites statists of all persuasions. They seem to sense - perhaps more clearly and subtly than many consistent defenders of laissez-faire - that gold and economic freedom are inseparable, that the gold standard is an instrument of laissez-faire and that each implies and requires the other.

Alan Greenspan
Over the years I have had the most contact with Lee Kuan Yew, most recently in 2006, and have always found him impressive, even though we do not always see eye to eye. I met him first when he was George Shultz's guest at the famous (or infamous, depending on your perspective) Bohemian Grove, a male only bonding retreat among the redwoods of California.

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

Alan Greenspan
We are going through a period with no precedent in American history.

Alan Greenspan
I think Bill Clinton was the best Republican president we've had in a while.

Alan Greenspan
Globalization was exerting a dis-inflationary impact.

Alan Greenspan
This modern risk-management paradigm held sway for decades. The whole intellectual edifice, however, collapsed in the summer of last year.

Alan Greenspan