Alan Greenspan Quotes - Page 3

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.

Skilled shortages in America exist because we are shielding our skilled labor force from world competition. [Visa quotas] have been substituted for the wage pricing mechanism. In the process we have created [a] privileged elite whose incomes are being supported at non-competitively high levels by immigration quotas on skilled professionals. Eliminating such restrictions would reduce at least some of the income inequality.

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.

There are no easy choices. Easy choices are long gone.

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

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

Gold, unlike all other commodities, is a currency...and the major thrust in the demand for gold is not for jewelry. It's not for anything other than an escape from what is perceived to be a fiat money system, paper money, that seems to be deteriorating.

No matter how skillful the trading scheme, over the long haul, abnormal returns are sustained only through abnormal exposure to risk.

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.

It's a bubble. It has to have intrinsic value. You have to really stretch your imagination to infer what the intrinsic value of Bitcoin is. I haven't been able to do it. Maybe somebody else can.

It seems superfluous to constrain trading in some of the newer derivatives and other innovative financial contracts of the past decade. The worst have failed; investors no longer fund them and are not likely to in the future.

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.

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.

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

Anyone willing to do what is required to become president of the United States is thereby barred from taking that office. I'm only half joking

People dont realize that we cannot forecast the future. What we can do is have probabilities of what causes what, but thats as far as we go. And Ive 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.

I do not deny that many appear to have succeeded in a material way by cutting corners and by manipulating associates, both in their professional and in their personal lives. But material success is possible in this world and far more satisfying when it comes without exploiting others.

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

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

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.

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

Senator, we are groping for understanding, the knowledge you assume I possess doesn't exist' - 'The only effective regulation lies in the propensity of customers to choose alternatives, of investors to move their funds elsewhere and of labour to acquire technical skills' - 'Senator, if I seem clear to you, you must have misunderstood me' - 'Unfortunately, Senator, nobody knows where the next innovative idea is coming from. Political decisions are never random and will always lose out to innovative alternatives

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.

I have one other issue I'd like to throw on the table. I hesitate to do it, but let me tell you some of the issues that are involved here. If we are dealing with psychology, then the thermometers one uses to measure it have an effect. I was raising the question on the side with Governor Mullins of what would happen if the Treasury sold a little gold in this market. There's an interesting question here because if the gold price broke in that context, the thermometer would not be just a measuring tool. It would basically affect the underlying psychology.