Alan Greenspan Quotes

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.

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

The number one problem in today's generation and economy is the lack of financial literacy.

I guess I should warn you, if I turn out to be particularly clear, you've probably misunderstood what I've said.

Protectionism will do little to create jobs and if foreigners retaliate, we will surely lose jobs.

Remember what we're looking at. Gold is a currency. It is still, by all evidence, a premier currency, that no fiat currency, including the dollar, can match.

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

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.

Gold still represents the ultimate form of payment in the world. Fiat money in extremis is accepted by nobody. Gold is always accepted.

To succeed, you will soon learn, as I did, the importance of a solid foundation in the basics of education - literacy, both verbal and numerical, and communication skills.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.

But rules cannot substitute for character.

The Iraq War is largely about oil.

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

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.

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

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

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

Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the 'hidden' confiscation of wealth. Gold stands in the way of this insidious process. It stands as a protector of property rights.

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.

Regulation of derivatives transactions that are privately negotiated by professionals is unnecessary.

There is nothing to guarantee the superior judgment, knowledge, and integrity of an inspector or a bureaucrat-and the deadly consequences of entrusting him with arbitrary power are obvious.

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.

Revolutions are something you see only in retrospect.

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

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

Credit-default swaps, I think, have serious problems associated with them.

If you think you understand what I am saying you do not understand what I am saying.

The gut-feel of the 55-year old trader is more important than the mathematical elegance of the 25-year old genius.

Rules cannot take the place of character.

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?

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.

We can guarantee cash benefits as far out and at whatever size you like, but we cannot guarantee their purchasing power.

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.

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.

Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the confiscation of wealth.

As long as we issue fiat currency, I see no alternative to a legal tender law.

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.

We need, in effect, to make the phantom 'lock-boxes' around the trust fund real.

I've always argued that this country has benefited immensely from the fact that we draw people from all over the world.

Crony capitalism is essentially a condition in which... public officials are giving favours to people in the private sector in payment of political favours.

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

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

History cannot be reduced to a set of statistics and probabilities.