Alan Greenspan is a renowned American economist who served as the Chairman of the ‘Federal Reserve Board’ for a period of 19 years. Initially, he was interested in pursuing a career as a musician and played Clarinet and Saxophone with the famous musician and lifelong friend, Stan Getz. He did his doctorate in Economics from the reputed New York University. During this period he worked on the Wall Street which helped him land up a job with a consulting firm. He started taking interest in politics and helped Richard Nixon in his election campaign. A few years later he was asked to lead the ‘Council of Economic Advisers’ where he served for two terms. By this time his huge economic intellect was known to all and made him the most suitable person to become the ‘Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve’. During his long tenure of nineteen years, he introduced significant reforms and worked for improving the nation's economy. The following collection of Alan Greenspan’s famous quotations and sayings has been curated from his speeches, writings, work, books, interviews and life. Take a look at the notable quotes by Alan Greenspan on business, freedom, history, America, jobs, finance, policies and economics.
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
Finance is wholly different from the rest the economy.
Alan Greenspan
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.
Alan Greenspan
Any informed borrower is simply less vulnerable to fraud and abuse.
Alan Greenspan
I'm a free-market economist from years and years back, and I've never veered from that.
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
If somebody had said to me in June or July of 1987, 'We'd like you to become chairman of the Federal Reserve, but you're never allowed to discuss any economics after you leave,' I'd have said, 'Forget it.' What do they want me to do? Become an anthropologist?'
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
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
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
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.
Alan Greenspan
Chinese productivity is the highest in the world but the way they do it is by borrowing the technology from abroad, either by joint ventures or other means.
Alan Greenspan
I guess I should warn you, if I turn out to be particularly clear, you've probably misunderstood what I've said.
Alan Greenspan
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
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
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
Unless you are willing to compromise, society cannot live together.
I get so engaged when I have a problem you cannot solve that I just cannot break away from what I am doing - I keep thinking and thinking and cannot stop.
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
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
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.
Alan Greenspan
We really can't forecast all that well, and yet we pretend that we can, but we really can't.
Alan Greenspan
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.
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.
Alan Greenspan
Whatever you tax, you get less of.
Alan Greenspan
I do not understand where the backing of Bitcoin is coming from. There is no fundamental issue of capabilities of repaying it in anything which is universally acceptable, which is either intrinsic value of the currency or the credit or trust of the individual who is issuing the money, whether it's a government or an individual.
Alan Greenspan
I stated that I'm a libertarian Republican, which means I believe in a series of issues, such as smaller government, constraint on budget deficits, free markets, globalization, and a whole series of other things, including welfare reform.
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 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
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
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
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.
Alan Greenspan
There are winners and there are losers. And as much as we would like to help the losers, if we do it in the way that directs the limited capital of the society to support the low-productivity parts of the economy, it means that the rest of the economy - our overall standard of living - will not rise as much as it could.
What a sound money system does is to stabilize all the elements in it, and reduces the uncertainty that people confront. And the one thing all human beings do when they are confronted with uncertainty is pull back, withdraw, disengage, and that means economic activity, which is really dealing with people, just goes straight down.
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
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.
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
Protectionism will do little to create jobs and if foreigners retaliate, we will surely lose jobs.
Alan Greenspan
If I turn out to be particularly clear, you've probably misunderstood what I've said.
Alan Greenspan
Revolutions are something you see only in retrospect.
Alan Greenspan
Anything that we can do to raise personal savings is very much in the interest of this country.
Alan Greenspan
Look, I'm very much in favor of tax cuts, but not with borrowed money. And the problem that we've gotten into in recent years is spending programs with borrowed money, tax cuts with borrowed money, and at the end of the day that proves disastrous. And my view is I don't think we can play subtle policy here.
Fear is a far more dominant force in human behaviour than euphoria - I would never have expected that or given it a moment's thought before, but it shows up in the data in so many ways.
History has not dealt kindly with the aftermath of protracted periods of low risk premiums.
Alan Greenspan
I've been in and out of Wall Street since 1949, and I've never seen the type of animosity between government and Wall Street. And I'm not sure where it comes from, but I suspect it's got to do with a general schism in this society which is really becoming ever more destructive.
There are errors in this book. I do not know where they are. If I did they wouldn't be there. But with close to two hundred thousand words my probabilistic mind tells me some are wrong.
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
Markets do very weird things because it reacts to how people behave, and sometimes people are a little screwy.
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.
I guess I should warn you, if I turn out to be particularly clear, you’ve probably misunderstood what I said.
Alan Greenspan
We're a democratic society. Shutting down the government should not be on the agenda.
Alan Greenspan
If I seem unduly clear to you, you must have misunderstood what I said. -- Speaking to a Senate Committee in 1987, as quoted in the Guardian Weekly, November 4, 2005.
Alan Greenspan
Government regulation cannot substitute for individual integrity.
Alan Greenspan
We had a bubble in housing.
Alan Greenspan
The only way to have several currencies from divergent nations lumped together is if they are culturally close, such as Germany, the Netherlands and Austria. If they aren't, it simply can't continue to work.
