Alan Greenspan

“The problem is you cannot have free global trade with highly restrictive, regulated domestic markets.”

“Much fiscal policy is implemented, not through spending increases, but through tax credits and other so-called tax expenditures. The markets should respond to them as they do spending cuts, with little contraction in economic activity.”

“The only thing that was economic, I might say, about my music career, aside from the fact that I did everybody's tax returns in the band, was the decision I made to leave the music business on economic grounds.”

“I wasn't able to do much reading when I was chairman of the Reserve Board. The workload was too large, and the luxury of reading was not available to me. So I caught up a good deal when I left office.”

“I was a fairly good amateur musician, and I was an average professional. But the one thing I saw was that the big band business was fading.”

“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.”

“Diplomacy is really far less important than the stock movements within Russia.”

“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.”

“Any informed borrower is simply less vulnerable to fraud and abuse.”

“Protectionism will do little to create jobs and if foreigners retaliate, we will surely lose jobs.”

“Finance is wholly different from the rest the economy.”

“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.”

“Anything that we can do to raise personal savings is very much in the interest of this country.”

“The person I liked the best was Gerald R. Ford. He was the most decent man in politics I ever had any relationships with.”

“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.”

“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.”

“I was a fairly good amateur musician, and I was an average professional. But the one thing I saw was that the big band business was fading. So I made an economic decision, and it turned out the best judgment I ever made in my life.”

“Whatever you tax, you get less of.”

“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.”

“We need, in effect, to make the phantom 'lock-boxes' around the trust fund real.”