Alan Greenspan Quotes

What an ideology is is a conceptual framework with the way people deal with reality. Everyone has one. You have to, to exist you need an ideology. The question is whether it is accurate or not.

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

The Iraq War is largely about oil.

Without calling the overall national issue a bubble, it's pretty clear that it's an unsustainable underlying pattern.

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

I'm always amazed that my wife can handle different subjects - one day politics, the next day foreign policy. And she always has so much fun doing it. We make a good team.

History demonstrates that participants in financial markets are susceptible to waves of optimism. Excessive optimism shows the seeds of its own reversal in the form of imbalances that tend to grow over time.

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

The use of a growing array of derivatives and the related application of more-sophisticated approaches to measuring and managing risk are key factors underpinning the greater resilience of our largest financial institutions... Derivatives have permitted the unbundling of financial risks.

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

The recent period has been marked by a transformation to an economy that is more productive as competitive forces become increasingly intense and new technologies raise the efficiency of our businesses...While these tendencies were no doubt in train in the "old," pre-1990s economy, they accelerated over the past decade as a number of technologies with their roots in the cumulative innovations of the past half-century began to yield dramatic economic returns.

Significantly opening up immigration to skilled workers solves two problems. The companies could hire the educated workers they need. And those workers would compete with high-income people, driving more income equality.

Stripped of its academic jargon, the welfare state is nothing more than a mechanism by which governments confiscate the wealth of the productive members of a society to support a wide variety of welfare schemes.

If I say something which you understand fully in this regard, I probably made a mistake.

Regulation - which is based on force and fear - undermines the moral base of business dealings. It becomes cheaper to bribe a building inspector than to meet his standards of construction. Protection of the consumer by regulation is thus illusory.

All taxes are a drag on economic growth. It's only a question of degree.

We ought to be opening up our borders to skilled labour from all parts of the world because [the state of the world is as follows: ] if we were to do that we would increase the supply of skilled workers that our schools have been unable to create and as a consequence of that we would lower the average wage of skills and reduce the degree of income inequality in this country.

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

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.

Indeed, better risk management may be the only truly necessary element of success in banking.

Now, I only play very occasionally, and in fact, more piano than clarinet or sax.

We will have more crises and none of them will look like this because no two crises have anything in common except human nature.

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.

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

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 more flexible an economy, the greater its ability to self-correct in response to inevitable, often unanticipated, disturbances and thus to contain the size and consequences of cyclical imbalances.

The tub helps me relax, and it's a great place to read.

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

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

Well, you probably will always believe there should be laws against fraud, and I don't think there is any need for a law against fraud.