Alan Greenspan Quotes

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Alan Greenspan

Profession : Economist

Birth : March 6, 1926

There is a huge number of people outside our borders who would love to come here. In fact, many of them come here, get well educated, and then are required to leave... This is a factor in income inequality.

Alan Greenspan

Diplomacy is really far less important than the stock movements within Russia.

Alan Greenspan

Forecasting our futures is built into our psyches because we will soon have to manage that future. We have no choice. No matter how often we fail, we can never stop trying.

Alan Greenspan

I'm a free-market economist from years and years back, and I've never veered from that.

Alan Greenspan

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.

Alan Greenspan

Much fiscal policy is implemented, not through spending increases, but through tax credits and other so-called tax expenditures. The markets should respond to them as they do spending cuts, with little contraction in economic activity.

Alan Greenspan

Every economy exists, no matter what the level of democracy, has elements of crony capitalism. It's - given human nature and given the democratic structures, which we all, I assume, adhere to, that is an inevitable consequence.

Alan Greenspan

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.

Alan Greenspan

Fear and euphoria are dominant forces, and fear is many multiples the size of euphoria. Bubbles go up very slowly as euphoria builds. Then fear hits, and it comes down very sharply. When I started to look at that, I was sort of intellectually shocked. Contagion is the critical phenomenon which causes the thing to fall apart.

Alan Greenspan

What I see in the corporate sector is very clearly an issue of a major shortfall in the issue of, what some people call confidence, but whatever you want to call it. Clearly people are looking out in the very distant future and they are saying that it is too complex.

Alan Greenspan

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.

Alan Greenspan

Fear invariably and universally induces disengagement, and disengagement is negative division of labor.

Alan Greenspan

Europe is very critical to the United States in the sense not only do we have a fourth of our exports there, but more importantly, a significant proportion of the foreign affiliate profits in fact, half of U.S. corporations, are in Europe.

Alan Greenspan

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

Alan Greenspan

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

Alan Greenspan

We're a democratic society. Shutting down the government should not be on the agenda.

Alan Greenspan