Alan Greenspan Quotes

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

The free lunch has still to be invented.

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

Anything that we can do to raise personal savings is very much in the interest of this country.

These days, even out of office, I still read economic reports.

I'm a plain soap kind of guy.

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

Although the outlook is clouded by a number of uncertainties, the central tendencies of the projections .. imply continued good economic performance in the United States.

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

I love to play tennis and golf, listen to music, watch baseball and root for the Redskins.

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.

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.

The recent evidence increasingly suggests that an economic expansion is already well under way, although an array of influences unique to this business cycle seems likely to moderate its speed.

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

I'm a better economist than I was a sax player.

I love facts and figures. It's like following a detective story, piecing together what's going on in the economy.

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

It is decidedly not true that "nice guys finish last," as that highly original American baseball philosopher, Leo Durocher, was alleged to have said.

Whatever you tax you get less of.

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

Without the triggers, that tax cut is irreponsible fiscal policy. Eventually, I think that will be the consensus view.

If I've made myself clear, I've misspoken.

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

Excessive optimism sows the seeds of its own reversal.

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.

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

Productivity is notoriously difficult to predict.

The current financial crisis in the US is likely to be judged in retrospect as the most wrenching since the end of the Second World War.

...our market system depends critically on trust-trust in the word of our colleagues and trust in the word of those with whom we do business.

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

There is no evidence that the business cycle has been repealed.

You can't have the capitalist system if an increasing number of people think it is unjust.

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

[Republicans] swapped principle for power. They ended up with neither. They deserved to lose.

Greenspan, who knew so much more than most, knew far less than most supposed.

If we allow terrorism to undermine our freedom of action, we could reverse at least part of the palpable gains achieved by postwar globalization. It is incumbent upon us not to allow that to happen.

I'm not denying that monopolies are terrible things, but I am denying that it is readily easy to resolve them through legislation of that nature.

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.

We as central bankers need not be concerned if a collapsing financial asset bubble does not threaten to impair the real economy, its production, jobs and price stability.

Improvements in lending practices driven by information technology have enabled lenders to reach out to households with previously unrecognized borrowing capacities.

Unless you are willing to compromise, society cannot live together.

The person I liked the best was Gerald R. Ford. He was the most decent man in politics I ever had any relationships with.

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.

Finance is wholly different from the rest the economy.