Alan Greenspan Quotes

Of course, shedding the debt burden would be a happy development for our country, but it would nevertheless pose a big dilemma for the Fed. Our primary lever of monetary policy was buying and selling treasury securities-Uncle Sam's IOU's. But as the debt was paid down, those securities would grow scarce, leaving the Fed in need of a new set of assets to effect monetary policy.

[There are] signs of froth in some local markets where home prices seem to have risen to unsustainable levels.

Winston Churchill once said to his fellow countrymen, “We have not journeyed across the centuries, across the oceans, across the mountains, across the prairies, because we are made of sugar candy.” Today, thanks to a malign combination of litigation, regulation, and pedagogical fashion, sugar-candy people are everywhere.

It did not go without notice that Ayn Rand stood beside me as I took the oath of office in the presence of President Ford in the Oval Office. Ayn Rand and I remained close until she died in 1982, and I'm grateful for the influence she had on my life. I was intellectually limited until I met her.

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

These immigrants were an undoubted plus for the economy.5 They were disproportionately young adults with few dependents and a drive to make it. They were all by definition adventurers who were willing to risk an ocean voyage to a new world for a chance of a better life. They provided the hands and muscles that built the machines, roads, and bridges of a rapidly industrializing nation:

A study of a cohort of 4,800 African Americans born between 1952 and 1982 shows that, as they grew into adults, 69 percent of the cohort remain in the same county, 82 percent remain in the same state, and 90 percent remain in the same region. The figures for the previous generation were 50 percent, 65 percent, and 74 percent.

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.

People do not realize in [the U.S], for example, how tenuous our ties to international energy are. That is, we on a daily basis require continuous flow. If that flow is shut off, it causes catastrophic effects in the industrial world. And it's that which made [Saddam Hussein] far more important to get out than bin Laden.

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

We generally did not talk about the stock market very much at the Fed.

I know you think you understand what you thought I said , but I'm not sure realized that what you heard isn't what I meant

I know you think you understand what you thought I said but I'm not sure you realize that what you heard is not what I meant

It rejected the temptation to punish its opponents as the Europeans had done at Versailles, recognizing the wisdom of Herbert Hoover’s advice to Harry Truman in 1946 that “you can have vengeance, or peace, but you can’t have both.

America’s rise to greatness has been marred by numerous disgraces, prime among them the mistreatment of the aboriginal peoples and the enslavement of millions of African Americans. Yet judged against the broad sweep of history, it has been a huge positive. America has not only provided its own citizens with a prosperous life. It has exported prosperity in the form of innovations and ideas. Without America’s intervention in the Second World War, Adolf Hitler might well have subdued Europe. Without America’s unwavering commitment to the Cold War, Joseph Stalin’s progeny might still be in power in Eastern Europe and perhaps much of Asia. Uncle Sam provided the arsenal of democracy that saved the twentieth century from ruin.