Alan Greenspan 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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

The abandonment of the gold standard made it possible for the welfare statists to use the banking system as a means to an unlimited expansion of credit. 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. Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the hidden confiscation of wealth. Gold stands in the way of this insidious process. It stands as a protector of property rights. If one grasps this, one has no difficulty in understanding the statists' antagonism toward the gold standard.

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

Remember what we're looking at. Gold is a currency. It is still, by all evidence, a premier currency, that no fiat currency, including the dollar, can match.

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

I made a mistake in presuming that the self-interests of organisations, specifically banks and others, were such that they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders and their equity in the firms.

I don't think it's possible for the Fed to end its easy-money policies in a trouble-free manner. Recent episodes in which Fed officials hinted at a shift toward higher interest rates have unleashed significant volatility in markets, so there is no reason to suspect that the actual process of boosting rates would be any different. I think that real pressure is going to occur not by the initiation by the Federal Reserve, but by the markets themselves.

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.

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

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.

We are in the midst of a once-in-a-century credit tsunami. Central banks and governments are being required to take unprecedented measures. Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholders' equity are in a state of shocked disbelief.

By far the most significant event in finance during the past decade has been the extraordinary development and expansion of financial derivatives.

To succeed, you will soon learn, as I did, the importance of a solid foundation in the basics of education - literacy, both verbal and numerical, and communication skills.

There are no easy choices. Easy choices are long gone.

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

Amateurs want to be right. Professionals want to make money.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

The Iraq War is largely about oil.

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

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

But rules cannot substitute for character.

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.

The process of innovation is, of course, never ending.

Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the 'hidden' confiscation of wealth. Gold stands in the way of this insidious process. It stands as a protector of property rights.

The arts develop skills and habits of mind that are important for workers in the new economy of ideas.

If prices go down, we will have problems - problems in the sense of spillover to other areas.

Before I met Ayn Rand, I was a logical positivist, and accordingly, I didn't believe in absolutes, moral or otherwise. If I couldn't prove a proposition with facts and figures, it was without merit.

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.

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.

Regulation of derivatives transactions that are privately negotiated by professionals is unnecessary.

An almost hysterical antagonism toward the gold standard is one issue which unites statists of all persuasions. They seem to sense... that gold and economic freedom are inseparable.

Revolutions are something you see only in retrospect.

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

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...

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

This decade is strewn with examples of bright people who thought they built a better mousetrap that could consistently extract abnormal returns from the financial markets. Some succeed for a time. But while there may occasionally be mis-configurations among market prices that allow abnormal returns, they do not persist.

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.