Alan Greenspan People Quotations

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.

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.

Crony capitalism is essentially a condition in which... public officials are giving favours to people in the private sector in payment of political favours.

There is a huge number of people outside our borders who would love to come here. In fact, many of them come here, get well educated, and then are required to leave... This is a factor in income inequality.

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.

Markets do very weird things because it reacts to how people behave, and sometimes people are a little screwy.

What I see in the corporate sector is very clearly an issue of a major shortfall in the issue of, what some people call confidence, but whatever you want to call it. Clearly people are looking out in the very distant future and they are saying that it is too complex.

I've always argued that this country has benefited immensely from the fact that we draw people from all over the world.

Significantly opening up immigration to skilled workers solves two problems. The companies could hire the educated workers they need. And those workers would compete with high-income people, driving more income equality.

You can't have the capitalist system if an increasing number of people think it is unjust.

This decade is strewn with examples of bright people who thought they built a better mousetrap that could consistently extract abnormal returns from the financial markets. Some succeed for a time. But while there may occasionally be mis-configurations among market prices that allow abnormal returns, they do not persist.

Most people are so traumatized that the thought of doing anything other than preserving cash is not first on their agenda, ... If you wait too long, you lose your window of opportunity, but there's no need to move forward before the August recess.

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

I think that the market is ultimately driven by real forces, ... Once you get a decline started, it's not clear whether people use that as a reason to sell or buy.

I think people are going to be quite surprised at their heating bills this winter,

It's important that whomever I pick is viewed as an independent person from politics. It's this independence that gives people not only here in America, but the world, confidence.