Alan Greenspan is an economist from New York City who is most known for his time spent as the Chairman of the Federal Reserve in the United States. He served from 1987 until 2006 and became one of the prominent political figures of his time. He still speaks regularly about he state of the American economy and own a financial advising company. Here are some of his intelligent and thought provoking quotes.
“American consumers might benefit if lenders provided greater mortgage product alternatives to the traditional fixed-rate mortgage.”
“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.”
“Any informed borrower is simply less vulnerable to fraud and abuse.”
rt @JohnConstintine
$BUND $ZB_F $TLT $ES_F $DAX Greenspan on DEBT Derivatives – Rate hike – Fiscal Policy pic.twitter.com/wvw69LCwSV
— alan greenspan (@alangreenspn) September 9, 2015
“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.”
“Cash is available and we should use that in larger amounts, as is necessary, to solve the problems of the stress of this.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Diplomacy is really far less important than the stock movements within Russia.”
“Forecasting our futures is built into our psyches because we will soon have to manage that future. We have no choice. No matter how often we fail, we can never stop trying.”
“History has not dealt kindly with the aftermath of protracted periods of low risk premiums.”
"Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the confiscation of wealth." — Alan Greenspan. pic.twitter.com/U4dglBjCXv
— Mark I. Werts (@markiwerts) October 31, 2015
“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 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.”
“I think Bill Clinton was the best Republican president we’ve had in a while.”
“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.”
“I was intellectually limited until I met her.”
“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.”
“If I turn out to be particularly clear, you’ve probably misunderstood what I’ve said.”
“I’m a free-market economist from years and years back, and I’ve never veered from that.”
“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.”
“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.”
“I’ve always considered myself more of a mathematician than a psychologist.”
“Markets do very weird things because it reacts to how people behave, and sometimes people are a little screwy.”
“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.”
“One of the major problems with China is that its innovation is largely borrowed technology.”
“Rising interest rates have been advertised for so long and in so many places that anyone who has not appropriately hedged this position by now obviously is desirous of losing money.”
“The person I liked the best was Gerald R. Ford. He was the most decent man in politics I ever had any relationships with.”
Pretty cool seeing @LaborSec Tom Perez & Fed Chair Emeritus Alan Greenspan together at the @BLS_gov #CES symposium! pic.twitter.com/k3FQcoAowM
— Emily Liner (@MsEmilyLiner) October 19, 2015
“The United States can pay any debt it has because we can always print money to do that. So there is zero probability of default.”
“There is a huge number of people outside our borders who would love to come here. In fact, many of them come here, get well educated, and then are required to leave… This is a
factor in income inequality.”
“There is a limit to how much the United States Treasury can borrow.”
“We need, in effect, to make the phantom ‘lock-boxes’ around the trust fund real.”
“We really can’t forecast all that well, and yet we pretend that we can, but we really can’t.”
“We’re a democratic society. Shutting down the government should not be on the agenda.”
“Whatever you tax, you get less of.”
“When you go back and look at American history, it’s not terribly different from Canadian history. If you weren’t self-reliant on the prairie, you wouldn’t survive.”
In this informative video, Greenspan talks about the current state of the American economy and what steps need to be taken to improve it.
Thanks for stopping by to check out these great Alan Greenspan quotes, I hope you enjoyed them!
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