Top 100 Alan Greenspan Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “I know you think you understand what you thought I said but I’m not sure you realize that what you heard is not what I meant.”

— Alan Greenspan

2. “The number one problem in today’s generation and economy is the lack of financial literacy.”

— Alan Greenspan

Featured in: Financial Success Quotes, Quotes About Numbers

3. “If you think you understand what I am saying you do not understand what I am saying.”

— Alan Greenspan

4. “Amateurs want to be right. Professionals want to make money.”

— Alan Greenspan

5. “To succeed, you will soon learn, as I did, the importance of a solid foundation in the basics of education – literacy, both verbal and numerical, and communication skills.”

— Alan Greenspan

6. “How do we know when irrational exuberance has unduly escalated asset values?”

— Alan Greenspan

7. “Gold still represents the ultimate form of payment in the world. Fiat money in extremis is accepted by nobody. Gold is always accepted.”

— Alan Greenspan

8. “Productivity is notoriously difficult to predict.”

— Alan Greenspan

Featured in: Productivity Quotes

9. “Indeed, better risk management may be the only truly necessary element of success in banking.”

— Alan Greenspan

10. “If I’ve made myself clear, I’ve misspoken.”

— Alan Greenspan

11. “The process of innovation is, of course, never ending.”

— Alan Greenspan

12. “We can guarantee cash benefits as far out and at whatever size you like, but we cannot guarantee their purchasing power.”

— Alan Greenspan

13. “Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the confiscation of wealth.”

— Alan Greenspan

14. “The gut-feel of the 55-year old trader is more important than the mathematical elegance of the 25-year old genius.”

— Alan Greenspan

15. “The Iraq War is largely about oil.”

— Alan Greenspan

16. “Whatever you tax you get less of.”

— Alan Greenspan

17. “Since I’ve become a central banker, I’ve learned to mumble with great incoherence. If I seem unduly clear to you, you must have misunderstood what I said.”

— Alan Greenspan

18. “I guess I should warn you, if I turn out to be particularly clear, you’ve probably misunderstood what I’ve said.”

— Alan Greenspan

19. “But 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?”

— Alan Greenspan

20. “Excessive optimism sows the seeds of its own reversal.”

— Alan Greenspan

21. “I have found no greater satisfaction than achieving success through honest dealing and strict adherence to the view that, for you to gain, those you deal with should gain as well.”

— Alan Greenspan

22. “Remember what we’re looking at. Gold is a currency. It is still, by all evidence, a premier currency, that no fiat currency, including the dollar, can match.”

— Alan Greenspan

23. “The guiding purpose of the government regulator is to prevent rather than to create something.”

— Alan Greenspan

24. “Corruption, embezzlement, fraud, these are all characteristics which exist everywhere. It is regrettably the way human nature functions, whether we like it or not. What successful economies do is keep it to a minimum. No one has ever eliminated any of that stuff.”

— Alan Greenspan

25. “Regulation of derivatives transactions that are privately negotiated by professionals is unnecessary.”

— Alan Greenspan

26. “If I say something which you understand fully in this regard, I probably made a mistake.”

— Alan Greenspan

27. “I do not deny that many appear to have succeeded in a material way by cutting corners and by manipulating associates, both in their professional and in their personal lives. But material success is possible in this world and far more satisfying when it comes without exploiting others.”

— Alan Greenspan

28. “When trust is lost, a nation’s ability to transact business is palpably undermined.”

— Alan Greenspan

29. “If all currencies are moving up or down together, the question is: relative to what? Gold is the canary in the coal mine. It signals problems with respect to currency markets. Central banks should pay attention to it.”

— Alan Greenspan

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

— Alan Greenspan

31. “No matter how skillful the trading scheme, over the long haul, abnormal returns are sustained only through abnormal exposure to risk.”

— Alan Greenspan

32. “But rules cannot substitute for character.”

— Alan Greenspan

33. “Anyone willing to do what is required to become president of the United States is thereby barred from taking that office. I’m only half joking.”

— Alan Greenspan

34. “The more flexible an economy, the greater its ability to self-correct in response to inevitable, often unanticipated, disturbances and thus to contain the size and consequences of cyclical imbalances.”

— Alan Greenspan

35. “The current financial crisis in the US is likely to be judged in retrospect as the most wrenching since the end of the Second World War.”

— Alan Greenspan

36. “A decline in the national housing price level would need to be substantial to trigger a significant rise in foreclosures, because the vast majority of homeowners have built up substantial equity in their homes despite large mortgage-market financed withdrawals of home equity in recent years.”

— Alan Greenspan

37. “History demonstrates that participants in financial markets are susceptible to waves of optimism. Excessive optimism shows the seeds of its own reversal in the form of imbalances that tend to grow over time.”

— Alan Greenspan

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

— Alan Greenspan

39. “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.”

— Alan Greenspan

Featured in: Momentum Quotes

40. “It has been my experience that competency in mathematics, both in numerical manipulations and in understanding its conceptual foundations, enhances a person’s ability to handle the more ambiguous and qualitative relationships that dominate our day-to-day financial decision-making.”

— Alan Greenspan

41. “As long as we issue fiat currency, I see no alternative to a legal tender law.”

— Alan Greenspan

42. “The United States can pay any debt it has because we can always print money to do that. So there is zero probability of default.”

— Alan Greenspan

43. “I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.”

— Alan Greenspan

44. “There is no evidence that the business cycle has been repealed.”

— Alan Greenspan

45. “It is decidedly not true that “nice guys finish last,” as that highly original American baseball philosopher, Leo Durocher, was alleged to have said.”

— Alan Greenspan

46. “By far the most significant event in finance during the past decade has been the extraordinary development and expansion of financial derivatives.”

— Alan Greenspan

47. “What we have found over the years in the marketplace is that derivatives have been an extraordinarily useful vehicle to transfer risk from those who shouldn’t be taking it to those who are willing to and are capable of doing so.”

— Alan Greenspan

48. “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.”

— Alan Greenspan

49. “All taxes are a drag on economic growth. It’s only a question of degree.”

— Alan Greenspan

50. “I have long argued that paying down the national debt is beneficial for the economy: it keeps interest rates lower than they otherwise would be and frees savings to finance increases in the capital stock, thereby boosting productivity and real incomes.”

— Alan Greenspan