Alan Greenspan - The Age of Turbulence (2007)

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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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alan Greenspan
We as central bankers need not be concerned if a collapsing financial asset bubble does not threaten to impair the real economy, its production, jobs and price stability.

Alan Greenspan
The Fabians laid the groundwork for modern social democracy, and their influence on the world would end up being at least as powerful as that of Marx.

Alan Greenspan
I came to a stark realization: chronic surpluses could be almost as destabilizing as chronic deficits.

Alan Greenspan
Much of the securitization took the form of collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) with senior credit tranches certified by rating agencies as AAA. It was the failure to properly price such risky assets that characterized the crisis.

Alan Greenspan
Globalization was exerting a dis-inflationary impact.

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

Alan Greenspan