Alan Greenspan quotes - page 3

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. (Alan Greenspan)
Revolutions are something you see only in retrospect. View quote
Alan Greenspan
Crony capitalism is essentially a condition in which... public officials are giving favours to people in the private sector in payment of political favours. View quote
Alan Greenspan
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. View quote
Alan Greenspan
The very nature of finance is that it cannot be profitable unless it is significantly leveraged... and as long as there is debt, there can be failure and contagion. View quote
Alan Greenspan
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. View quote
Alan Greenspan
Any informed borrower is simply less vulnerable to fraud and abuse. View quote
Alan Greenspan
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. View quote
Alan Greenspan
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. View quote
Alan Greenspan
Anything that we can do to raise personal savings is very much in the interest of this country. View quote
Alan Greenspan
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. (Alan Greenspan)
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. View quote
Alan Greenspan
Protectionism will do little to create jobs and if foreigners retaliate, we will surely lose jobs. View quote
Alan Greenspan
Whatever you tax you get less of. View quote
Alan Greenspan
Every economy exists, no matter what the level of democracy, has elements of crony capitalism. It's - given human nature and given the democratic structures, which we all, I assume, adhere to, that is an inevitable consequence. View quote
Alan Greenspan
Chinese productivity is the highest in the world but the way they do it is by borrowing the technology from abroad, either by joint ventures or other means. View quote
Alan Greenspan
If you want a simple model for predicting the unemployment rate in the United States over the next few years, here it is: It will be what Greenspan wants it to be, plus or minus a random error reflecting the fact that he is not quite God. View quote
Alan Greenspan
Thus, the willingness of workers in recent years to trade off smaller increases in wages for greater job security seems to be reasonably well documented. View quote
Alan Greenspan
I was intellectually limited until I met her. View quote
Alan Greenspan
It was the failure to properly price such risky assets that characterized the crisis. View quote
Alan Greenspan
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)
People don't realize that we cannot forecast the future. What we can do is have probabilities of what causes what, but that's as far as we go. And I've 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. View quote
Alan Greenspan
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. View quote
Alan Greenspan
We need, in effect, to make the phantom 'lock-boxes' around the trust fund real. View quote
Alan Greenspan
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. View quote
Alan Greenspan