Alan Greenspan Quotes

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Alan Greenspan

Profession : Economist

Birth : March 6, 1926

I always believed in animal spirits. It's not their existence that is new. It's the fact that they are not random events, but actually replicate in-bred qualities of human nature which create those animal spirits.

Alan Greenspan

The only way you get economic progress, real standards of living moving higher, is to have the savings of the society continuously invested in the cutting-edge technologies. And those technologies which are obsolescent get dropped out.

Alan Greenspan

Revolutions are something you see only in retrospect.

Alan Greenspan

Increased jobs are the consequence of increased trade. Increasing jobs more than output implies a fall in productivity and standards of living. That surely cannot be our goal.

Alan Greenspan

People don't realize that we cannot forecast the future. What we can do is have probabilities of what causes what, but that's as far as we go. And I've 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.

Alan Greenspan

One of the major problems with China is that its innovation is largely borrowed technology.

Alan Greenspan

I wasn't able to do much reading when I was chairman of the Reserve Board. The workload was too large, and the luxury of reading was not available to me. So I caught up a good deal when I left office.

Alan Greenspan

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.

Alan Greenspan

Finance is wholly different from the rest the economy.

Alan Greenspan

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

Alan Greenspan

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

Alan Greenspan

When you go back and look at American history, it's not terribly different from Canadian history. If you weren't self-reliant on the prairie, you wouldn't survive.

Alan Greenspan

The purpose of a politician is to be a leader. A politician has to lead. Otherwise he's just a follower.

Alan Greenspan

One of the problems with hedge funds is that they are changing so rapidly. If you have the balance sheet that closed business last night, by 11 A.M. this morning, that won't tell you very much about what they're doing.

Alan Greenspan

Since 1948 I have spent every single day thinking how the economic and political worlds have changed.

Alan Greenspan

Most high-income people in our country do not realize that their incomes are being subsidized by their protection from competition from highly skilled people who are prevented from immigrating to the United States. But we need such skills in order to staff our productive economy, so that the standard of living for Americans as a whole can grow.

Alan Greenspan

There is a limit to how much the United States Treasury can borrow.

Alan Greenspan

There's no other job in public life that is like chairman of the Fed.

Alan Greenspan

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.

Alan Greenspan

At the outset of the creation of the euro in 1999, it was expected that the southern eurozone economies would behave like those in the north; the Italians would behave like Germans. They didn't. Instead, northern Europe fell into subsidizing southern Europe's excess consumption, that is, its current account deficits.

Alan Greenspan