Alan Greenspan Quotes

We had a bubble in housing.

More than 90 percent of Americans lived in the countryside, either on farms or plantations. Only three cities, Philadelphia, Boston, and New York, had populations of more than 16,000, making them flyspecks compared with London (750,000) or Peking (almost 3 million).6

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

Eisenhower’s biggest domestic achievement was arguably the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956, which called for 41,000 miles of highways to be built by 1969 at an estimated cost of $ 25 billion. Predictably enough, the targets were missed: the first transcontinental interstate, I-80, was not finished until 1986 and the southern interstate, I-10, was not completed until 1990.

I guess I should warn you, if I turn out to be particularly clear, you’ve probably misunderstood what I said.

The Federal Reserve is an independent agency. And that means basically that there is no other agency of government which can overrule actions that we take. So long as that is in place, and there is no evidence that the administration, or congress, or anybody else is requesting that we do things other than what we think is the appropriate thing, then what the relationships are don't frankly matter. And I've had very good relationships with presidents.

The Fabians laid the groundwork for modern social democracy, and their influence on the world would end up being at least as powerful as that of Marx.

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

under the gold standard, a free banking system stands as the protector of an economy's stability and balanced growth... The abandonment of the gold standard made it possible for the welfare statists to use the banking system as a means to an unlimited expansion of credit... In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation

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.

An area in which more rather than less government involvement is needed, in my judgment, is the rooting out of fraud. It is the bane of any market system.

Capitalism is based on self-interest and self-esteem; it holds integrity and trustworthiness as cardinal virtues and makes them pay off in the marketplace, thus demanding that men survive by means of virtue, not vices. It is this superlatively moral system that the welfare statists propose to improve upon by means of preventative law, snooping bureaucrats, and the chronic goad of fear.

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.

Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholder's equity – myself especially – are in a state of shocked disbelief.

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. If there were, the government would have to make its holding illegal, as was done in the case of gold. If everyone decided, for example, to convert all his bank deposits to silver or copper or any other good, and thereafter declined to accept checks as payment for goods, bank deposits would lose their purchasing power and government-created bank credit would be worthless as a claim on goods. The financial policy of the welfare state requires that there be no way for the owners of wealth to protect themselves.