Words matter. These are the best Alan Greenspan Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
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.
Revolutions are something you see only in retrospect.
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.
Europe is very critical to the United States in the sense not only do we have a fourth of our exports there, but more importantly, a significant proportion of the foreign affiliate profits in fact, half of U.S. corporations, are in Europe.
I get so engaged when I have a problem you cannot solve that I just cannot break away from what I am doing – I keep thinking and thinking and cannot stop.
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.
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.
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.
One of the problems with hedge funds is that they are changing so rapidly. If you have the balance sheet that closed business last night, by 11 A.M. this morning, that won’t tell you very much about what they’re doing.
Bitcoin is really a fascinating example of how human beings create value, and is not always rational… tt is not a rational currency in that case.
I’m a free-market economist from years and years back, and I’ve never veered from that.
We’re a democratic society. Shutting down the government should not be on the agenda.
Since 1948 I have spent every single day thinking how the economic and political worlds have changed.
We need, in effect, to make the phantom ‘lock-boxes’ around the trust fund real.
Anything that we can do to raise personal savings is very much in the interest of this country.
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.
The only way to have several currencies from divergent nations lumped together is if they are culturally close, such as Germany, the Netherlands and Austria. If they aren’t, it simply can’t continue to work.
Crony capitalism is essentially a condition in which… public officials are giving favours to people in the private sector in payment of political favours.
Increased jobs are the consequence of increased trade. Increasing jobs more than output implies a fall in productivity and standards of living. That surely cannot be our goal.
Finance is wholly different from the rest the economy.
The only thing that was economic, I might say, about my music career, aside from the fact that I did everybody’s tax returns in the band, was the decision I made to leave the music business on economic grounds.
I think the whole issue of a debt ceiling makes no sense to me whatsoever. Anybody who is remotely adroit at arithmetic doesn’t need a debt ceiling to tell you where you are.
If I turn out to be particularly clear, you’ve probably misunderstood what I’ve said.
I wasn’t able to do much reading when I was chairman of the Reserve Board. The workload was too large, and the luxury of reading was not available to me. So I caught up a good deal when I left office.
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.
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.
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.
The person I liked the best was Gerald R. Ford. He was the most decent man in politics I ever had any relationships with.
I stated that I’m a libertarian Republican, which means I believe in a series of issues, such as smaller government, constraint on budget deficits, free markets, globalization, and a whole series of other things, including welfare reform.
I always believed in animal spirits. It’s not their existence that is new. It’s the fact that they are not random events, but actually replicate in-bred qualities of human nature which create those animal spirits.
The culture of Greece is not the same as the culture of Germany, and to fuse them into a single unit is extremely difficult.
Fear invariably and universally induces disengagement, and disengagement is negative division of labor.
I was sort of shocked when it all of a sudden turned out that I got all A’s through college, with the exception of two B’s in the first term. I never envisaged myself as summa cum laude.
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.
We really can’t forecast all that well, and yet we pretend that we can, but we really can’t.
The central focus of what we are doing at the Fed is to keep inflation from accelerating – and preferably decelerating.
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.
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.
Protectionism will do little to create jobs and if foreigners retaliate, we will surely lose jobs.
Manufacturing capacity is not a rigid level against which one bounces. When you are dealing with a world economy, with a flexibility to employ production facilities other than one’s own, then the concept of capacity is vaguer.
It is very difficult to predict when a bond crisis could happen.
The only way you get economic progress, real standards of living moving higher, is to have the savings of the society continuously invested in the cutting-edge technologies. And those technologies which are obsolescent get dropped out.
The purpose of a politician is to be a leader. A politician has to lead. Otherwise he’s just a follower.
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. So I made an economic decision, and it turned out the best judgment I ever made in my life.
