Alan Greenspan Current Quotations

At the outset of the creation of the euro in 1999, it was expected that the southern eurozone economies would behave like those in the north; the Italians would behave like Germans. They didn't. Instead, northern Europe fell into subsidizing southern Europe's excess consumption, that is, its current account deficits.

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,

no doubt that the current stance of policy ? will need to be changed at some point.

If we can maintain an adequate degree of flexibility, some of America 's economic imbalances, most notably the large current account deficit and the housing boom, can be rectified by adjustments in prices, interest rates, and exchange rates rather than through more-wrenching changes in output, incomes, and employment.

But, given our current state of knowledge, I find it difficult to envision central banks successfully targeting asset prices any time soon,

I suspect that with the underlying database publicly available, it is just a matter of time before the ex-post results of analysts recommendations are compiled and published on a regular basis, ... I venture to say that with such transparency, the current upward bias of analysts' earnings projections would diminish rather rapidly.

The present policy path makes current promises, at least in real terms, highly conjectural,

This situation suggests that international investors will eventually adjust their accumulation of dollar assets or, alternatively, seek higher dollar returns to offset concentration risk, elevating the cost of financing of the U.S. current account deficit and rendering it increasingly less tenable,

As a consequence of our current dependence on computers, some Y2K-related failures could have noticeable effects on the economy,

It seems persuasive that, given the size of the U.S. current account deficit, a diminished appetite for adding to dollar balances must occur at some point,

Indeed, our goal, in responding to the complexity of current economic forces, is to extend the expansion by containing imbalances and avoiding the very recession that would complete a business cycle,

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 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,

The current economic performance, with its combination of strong growth and low inflation, is as impressive as any I have witnessed in my near half-century of daily observation of the American economy,