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.”

“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.”

“It's hard to tell which assets will be toxic. The best way to ensure that only shareholders and banks feel it is have adequate capital.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“You have to really stretch your imagination to infer what the intrinsic value of Bitcoin is. I haven't been able to do it. Maybe somebody else can.”

“Revolutions are something you see only in retrospect.”

“The culture of Greece is not the same as the culture of Germany, and to fuse them into a single unit is extremely difficult.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“I think the whole issue of a debt ceiling makes no sense to me whatsoever. Anybody who is remotely adroit at arithmetic doesn't need a debt ceiling to tell you where you are.”

“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've been around long enough to know that a good deal of the praise heaped on me I had nothing to do with. The only thing I did object to was the fact that where the criticism was actually wrong. Did it bother me? Of course it bothered me. But I've been around long enough to have ups and downs. So you get over it.”

“Bitcoin is really a fascinating example of how human beings create value, and is not always rational... tt is not a rational currency in that case.”

“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?'”

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

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

“The central focus of what we are doing at the Fed is to keep inflation from accelerating - and preferably decelerating.”