Alan Greenspan Economy Quotations

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.

History has not dealt kindly with the aftermath of protracted periods of low risk premiums.

There are winners and there are losers. And as much as we would like to help the losers, if we do it in the way that directs the limited capital of the society to support the low-productivity parts of the economy, it means that the rest of the economy - our overall standard of living - will not rise as much as it could.

Over the past decade, the U.S. economy has benefited from a remarkable acceleration of productivity. But experience suggests that such rapid advances are unlikely to be maintained in an economy that has reached the cutting edge of technology.

Over the last few months, these forces have taken their toll on activity, and evidence has accumulated that the economy has hit a soft patch,

the amount of rate cuts required to revive the economy will not be deep.

Thus our baseline outlook for the U.S. economy is one of sustained economic growth and contained inflation pressures. In our view, realizing this outcome will require the Federal Reserve to continue to remove monetary accommodation.

There have been signs recently that some of the forces that have been restraining the economy over the past year are starting to diminish and that activity is beginning to firm,

Because it is difficult to suppress growing market exuberance when the economic environment is perceived as more stable, a highly flexible system needs to be in place to rebalance an economy in which psychology and asset prices could change rapidly,

is scheduled to discuss the flexibility of the U.S. economy and its resilience to shocks, a topic he addressed two weeks ago.

The system was holding up ... the American economy kept getting battered and battered and battered and it was still standing and indeed, as of Sept. 10, it was still standing,

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

a distinguished appointment. Ben comes with superb academic credentials and important insights into the ways our economy functions.

The one certainty is that the resolution of the nation's demographic challenge will require hard choices and that the future performance of the economy will depend on those choices.

Nowhere in the world are the synergies of small and large businesses operating side-by-side in a dynamic market economy more apparent than in this country.

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.

Despite some of the risks that I have highlighted, the U.S. economy seems to be on a reasonably firm footing, and underlying inflation remains contained,

Although the business cycle has not disappeared, flexibility has made the economy more resilient to shocks and more stable overall during the past couple of decades,

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.

The addition of the Chinese economy to the global marketplace will result in a more efficient worldwide allocation of resources and will raise standards of living in China and its trading partners,

That greater tendency toward self-correction has made the cyclical stability of the economy less dependent on the actions of macroeconomic policy makers, whose responses often have come too late or have been misguided.

The U.S. economy appears to have withstood a set of blows -- major declines in equity markets, a sharp retrenchment in investment spending, and the tragic terrorist attacks of last September -- that in previous business cycles almost surely would have induced a severe contraction,

in modest quantities does enhance the rate of growth of the economy and does create higher standards of living, but in excess, creates very serious problems.

...In an economy that already has lost some momentum, one must remain alert to the possibility that greater caution and weakening asset values in financial markets could signal or precipitate an excessive softening in household and business spending,

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

I don't think we did pop the bubble. We did raise interest rates in 1999, and the reason we did that is that real long-term rates were beginning to rise because the economy was beginning to accelerate,

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.

... the flexibility of our market-driven economy has allowed us, thus far, to weather reasonably well the steep rise in spot and futures prices for crude oil and natural gas that we have experienced over the past two years,

The growing stability of the world economy over the past decade may have encouraged investors to accept increasingly lower levels of compensation for risk.

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,

The economic fundamentals remain firm, and the U.S. economy appears to retain important forward momentum,

The economy suffered significant shocks in late summer and early autumn,

The economy is turning, and credit comes in with a lag, ... To the extent that a number of small firms are finding it difficult to get the credit they need at a price they can afford, that's likely to change for the better.

The complexity of our economy is such, and the way liquidity flows through the system is such, that you essentially get very complex differences in the way monetary policy plays out, ... But, at the end of the day, it does seem to be effective.