Alan Greenspan quotes

Alan Greenspan is an American economist who served as Chairman of the Federal Reserve of the United States for nearly two decades. His policies and decisions had a significant impact on the global financial system and monetary policy. He is recognized as one of the most influential central bankers in modern history. Here are 77 of his quotes:

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.

Alan Greenspan

History has not dealt kindly with the aftermath of protracted periods of low risk premiums.

Alan Greenspan

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:...

Alan Greenspan

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

Alan Greenspan

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

Alan Greenspan

I came to a stark realization: chronic surpluses could be almost as destabilizing as chronic deficits.

Alan Greenspan

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.

Alan Greenspan

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

Alan Greenspan

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

Alan Greenspan

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.

Alan Greenspan

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.

Alan Greenspan

American consumers might benefit if lenders provided greater mortgage product alternatives to the traditional fixed-rate mortgage.

Alan Greenspan

Cash is available and we should use that in larger amounts, as is necessary, to solve the problems of the stress of this.

Alan Greenspan

Nor can private counterparties restrict supplies of gold, another commodity whose derivatives are often traded over-the-counter, where central banks stand ready to lease gold in increasing quantities should the price rise.

Alan Greenspan

While local economies may experience significant price imbalances, a national severe price distortion seems most unlikely in the United States, given its size and diversity.

Alan Greenspan

Since becoming a central banker, I have learned to mumble with great incoherence. If I seem unduly clear to you, you must have misunderstood what I said.

Alan Greenspan

Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholder's equity – myself especially – are in a state of shocked disbelief.

Alan Greenspan

Over the years I have had the most contact with Lee Kuan Yew, most recently in 2006, and have always found him impressive, even though we do not always see eye to eye. I met him first when he was George Shultz's guest at the famous (or infamous, depending on your perspective) Bohemian Grove, a male only bonding retreat among the redwoods of California.

Alan Greenspan

But how do we know when irrational exuberance has unduly escalated asset values, which then become subject to unexpected and prolonged contractions as they have in Japan over the past decade?

Alan Greenspan

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.

Alan Greenspan

The Fabians laid the groundwork for modern social democracy, and their influence on the world would end up being at least as powerful as that of Marx.

Alan Greenspan

That said, there can be little doubt that exceptionally low interest rates on ten-year Treasury notes, and hence on home mortgages, have been a major factor in the recent surge of homebuilding and home turnover, and especially in the steep climb in home prices. Although a 'bubble' in home prices for the nation as a whole does not appear likely, there do appear to be, at a minimum, signs of froth in some local markets where home prices seem to have risen to unsustainable levels.

Alan Greenspan