Alan Greenspan Pro Quotations

I do think that we have to bring the existing instability to a level of stability reasonably shortly to prevent the contagion from really spilling over and creating some very significant kinds of problems for all of us.

How do we know when irrational exuberance has unduly escalated asset values, which then become subject to unexpected and prolonged contractions as they have in Japan over the past decade?

could prove destabilizing to our financial system as a whole and in the end could seriously diminish the availability of home mortgage funds.

Investing a portion of the Social Security trust fund assets in equities as the administration and others have proposed would arguably put at risk the efficiency of our capital markets and, thus, our economy,

The demand for new computer applications will no doubt continue to spur demand for those with the creativity and the higher-level conceptual skills that will enable us to increasingly harness technology to produce greater economic value,

Firms still appear hesitant to spend and hire, and we need to remain mindful of the possibility that lingering business caution could be an impediment to improved economic performance,

Despite the tightest labor markets in a generation, more workers report in a prominent survey that they are fearful of losing their jobs than similar surveys found in 1991 at the bottom of the last recession, ... The marked move of capital from failing to technologies to those at the cutting edge has quickened the pace at which job skills become obsolete.

The Federal Reserve has been unable to find any credible purpose for the huge balance sheets built by Fannie and Freddie other than the creation of profit through the exploitation of the market-granted subsidy,

The Federal Reserve Bank of New York's efforts were designed solely to enhance the probability of an orderly private-sector adjustment, ... No Federal Reserve funds were put at risk, no promises were made by the Federal Reserve and no individual firms were pressured to participate.

History cannot be reduced to a set of statistics and probabilities.

Regulation - which is based on force and fear - undermines the moral base of business dealings. It becomes cheaper to bribe a building inspector than to meet his standards of construction. Protection of the consumer by regulation is thus illusory.

If prices go down, we will have problems - problems in the sense of spillover to other areas, Greenspan said. While he hasn't seen such spreading yet, I expect to.

Productivity is notoriously difficult to predict.

The process of innovation is, of course, never ending.

While (Japan) has made some important efforts, it has yet to make significant progress in diversifying the financial system,

In principle, stock-option grants, properly constructed, can be highly effective in aligning corporate officers' incentives with those of shareholders, ... Regrettably, the current accounting for options has created some perverse effects on the quality of corporate disclosures that, arguably, is further complicating the evaluation of earnings.

The extent and pace of recovery of Asian economies currently experiencing a severe downturn will have important ramifications for prices of energy and other commodities, the strength of the dollar, and competitive conditions on world product markets,

Administrative protection in the form of antidumping suits and countervailing duties is a case in point,

It is becoming increasingly difficult to deny that something profoundly different than the postwar business cycle has emerged in recent years,

The markets are demanding that we change outdated statutory limitations that stand in the way of more efficiently and effectively delivering financial services to the public, ... The Federal Reserve agrees and urges prompt enactment of financial modernization legislation.

We should not be cutting taxes by borrowing, ... We do not have the capability of having both productive tax cuts and large expenditure increases, and presume that the deficit doesn't matter.

Competition is the necessary driving force toward delivering a superior product or service, ... We should not shy away from it.

Doubtless, the substantial improvement in the access of business decision makers to real-time information has played a key role, ... Today, businesses have large quantities of data available virtually in real time. As a consequence, they address and resolve economic imbalances far more rapidly than in the past.

China's progress towards prosperity and accession into the WTO will create new opportunities for American businesses and farmers,

Manufacturing capacity is not a rigid level against which one bounces. When you are dealing with a world economy, with a flexibility to employ production facilities other than one's own, then the concept of capacity is vaguer.

One of the major problems with China is that its innovation is largely borrowed technology.

One of the problems with hedge funds is that they are changing so rapidly. If you have the balance sheet that closed business last night, by 11 A.M. this morning, that won't tell you very much about what they're doing.

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.

While these forms of protection have often been imposed under the label of promoting so-called 'fair trade,' oftentimes they are just simple guises for inhibiting competition.

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.

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.

We've come a long way through this adjustment process and we're still standing and that's good news, ... is still not doing well but (is) far better given what has happened than I would have forecast six, eight, nine months ago.

Economic policymakers face enormous uncertainty. Economic models provide a set of useful tools to frame future outcomes, but as we were reminded repeatedly during our efforts to forecast the economy in 1974 and 1975, models can go off track in myriad ways, ... Objective and thorough analysis ... is the most effective counterweight to this challenge.

New hires and recalls from layoffs... are far below what historical experience indicates, ... To a surprising degree, firms seem to be able to continue identifying and implementing new efficiencies in their production processes and thus have found it possible so far to meet increasing orders without stepping up hiring.

The rapid growth and increasing importance of derivative instruments in the risk profile of many large banks has been a particular concern,

Indeed only such highly liquid portfolios would be consistent with (government-sponsored enterprises') mission of providing primary mortgage market liquidity during a crisis, particularly a financial crisis,

Indeed, only such highly liquid portfolios would be consistent with (government-sponsored enterprises') mission of providing primary mortgage market liquidity during a crisis, particularly a financial crisis,

The problem that exists here is that unless we can close the gap between supply and demand by accelerating productivity, which we are doing in part, then the prosperity that everyone is experiencing would be put in great jeopardy,

The problems that we have seen are, in one sense, more domestic than they are international,

The impressive performance of the U.S. economy over the past couple of decades, despite shocks that in the past would have produced marked economic contractions, offers the clearest evidence of the benefits of increased market flexibility,

Throughout all this history, the CEA has, in most cases, provided the president with the best economic advice available at the time and has, crucially, been a consistent advocate for the importance of market forces,

Profoundly beneficial forces driving the American economy to competitive excellence are also engendering a set of imbalances that, unless contained, threaten our continuing prosperity,

profound implications for the free world's trading system and the long-term growth potential of the American economy.

There are powerful reasons to suspect that the elimination of the double taxation of dividends and cuts in marginal tax rates will elevate long-term productivity, ... If, however, in the process we get a significant increase in deficits, which induce a rise in long-term interest rates, that will be a significant undercutting of the benefits achieved by tax cuts.

The more flexible an economy, the greater its ability to self-correct after inevitable, often unanticipated disturbances, ... The impressive performance of the U.S. economy over the past couple of decades, despite shocks that in the past would have surely produced marked economic contraction, offers the clearest evidence of the benefits of increased market flexibility.

Demand may be moving closer into line with the rate of advance in the economy's potential, given our continued impressive productivity growth, ... Should this favorable outcome prevail, the immediate threat to our prosperity from growing imbalances in our economy would abate.

We owe it to those who will retire over the next couple of decades to promise only what the government can deliver,

I thought that the initiative that the Senate produced was very important and very effective,

As I indicated several weeks ago to a university audience, ... it is just not credible that the United States, or for that matter Europe, can remain an oasis of prosperity unaffected by a world that is experiencing greatly increased stress.

If you're going to move to private accounts, which I approve of, I think you have to do it in a cautious, gradual way.

We are seeing an evolving new international economy. We are in the process of learning how it works as we are doing it, ... Fortunately, the trauma that came out of the Russian default created so much risk aversion ... we probably have time to be deliberative in determining how the (international monetary) structure ought to be structured.

I recognize that there is a stock market bubble problem at this point, ... and I agree with Governor Lindsey that this is a problem that we should keep an eye on.

Should globalization be allowed to proceed and thereby create an ever more flexible international financial system, history suggests that current imbalances will be defused with little disruption,

Faster economic growth, doubtless, would make deficits far easier to contain. But faster economic growth alone is not likely to be the full solution to currently projected long-term deficits.

A slowing in the rate of inventory liquidation will induce a rise in industrial production if demand for those products is stable or is falling only moderately, ... That rise in production will, other things being equal, increase household income and spending.

The capacity of workers, after being displaced, to find a new job that will eventually provide nearly comparable pay most often depends on the general knowledge of the worker and the ability of that individual to learn new skills,

The critical issue should be how to strengthen the legal base of free market capitalism: the property rights of shareholders and other owners of capital, ... Fraud and deception are thefts of property.

As a nation we owe it to our retirees to promise only the benefits that can be delivered.

The level of equity prices would appear to envision substantially greater growth of profits than has been experienced of late,

These changes, assisted by improved prices in asset markets, have left households and businesses better positioned than they were earlier to boost outlays as their wariness about the economic environment abates,

Looking ahead, the consensus expectation for a pickup in economic activity is not unreasonable, though the timing and extent of that improvement continue to be uncertain,

With production running well below sales, the lift to income and spending from the inevitable cessation of inventory liquidation could be significant,

With price inflation already at a low level, substantial further disinflation would be an unwelcome development, especially to the extent it put pressure on profit margins and impeded the revival of business spending,

The type of economy that we are dealing with at this particular stage is, I suspect, one that none of us has seen before, and indeed it may be unprecedented in our history, ... Our basic purpose is to keep that process going.

These products could be cause for some concern both because they expose borrowers to more interest-rate and house-price risk than the standard 30-year, fixed-rate mortgage and because they are seen as vehicles that enable marginally qualified, highly leveraged borrowers to purchase homes at inflated prices,

But as we struggle to make sense of our profound loss and its immediate consequences for the economy, ... we must not lose sight of our longer-run prospects, which have not been significantly diminished by these terrible events.

a process that has undoubtedly improved national productivity growth and standards of living.

Before the recovery process gets under way, stability will need to be restored to the American economy and to others around the world,

has got to be a factor in determining the propensity of people to spend money.

We have a moral obligation to use our prosperity at this moment, especially to uplift communities in poverty,

The United States has been in the forefront of the postwar opening up of international markets, much to our, and the rest of the world's, benefit, ... It would be a great tragedy were that process reversed.

I am concerned about the recent evident weakening of support for free trade, ... Should we endeavor to freeze competitive progress in place, we will almost certainly slow economic growth overall.

The physical assets of such a firm comprise a small proportion of its asset base, ... Trust and reputation can vanish overnight. A factory cannot.

The current surge in oil prices, though noticeable, is likely to prove significantly less consequential to economic growth and inflation than the surge in the 1970s,