A biography for Alan Greenspanhasn’t been written yet.
“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.”
“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.”
“I was a good amateur but only an average professional. I soon realized that there was a limit to how far I could rise in the music business, so I left the band and enrolled at New York University.”
“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.”
“It is very difficult to predict when a bond crisis could happen.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Unless you are willing to compromise, society cannot live together.”
“Markets do very weird things because it reacts to how people behave, and sometimes people are a little screwy.”
“Putin probably, almost certainly, thinks that one of the great disasters of the 20th century was the demise of the Soviet Union. It's very obvious that he's trying to work its way back and maintain something similar to that sort of institution.”
“I've always considered myself more of a mathematician than a psychologist.”
“It's only when the markets are perceived to have exhausted themselves on the downside that they turn. Trying to prevent them from going down just merely prolongs the agony.”
“I was sort of shocked when it all of a sudden turned out that I got all A's through college, with the exception of two B's in the first term. I never envisaged myself as summa cum laude.”
“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.”
“We really can't forecast all that well, and yet we pretend that we can, but we really can't.”
“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.”
“If I turn out to be particularly clear, you've probably misunderstood what I've said.”