Top 100 Alan Greenspan Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “Capitalism is based on self-interest and self-esteem; it holds integrity and trustworthiness as cardinal virtues and makes them pay off in the marketplace, thus demanding that men survive by means of virtue, not vices. It is this superlatively moral system that the welfare statists propose to improve upon by means of preventative law, snooping bureaucrats, and the chronic goad of fear.”

— Alan Greenspan

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

— Alan Greenspan

53. “Any informed borrower is simply less vulnerable to fraud and abuse.”

— Alan Greenspan

54. “In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation. There is no safe store of value.”

— Alan Greenspan

55. “In general, corruption tends to exist whenever governments have favors to extend, or something to sell.”

— Alan Greenspan

56. “Well, you probably will always believe there should be laws against fraud, and I don’t think there is any need for a law against fraud.”

— Alan Greenspan

57. “The arts develop skills and habits of mind that are important for workers in the new economy of ideas.”

— Alan Greenspan

58. “Before I met Ayn Rand, I was a logical positivist, and accordingly, I didn’t believe in absolutes, moral or otherwise. If I couldn’t prove a proposition with facts and figures, it was without merit.”

— Alan Greenspan

59. “I’m not denying that monopolies are terrible things, but I am denying that it is readily easy to resolve them through legislation of that nature.”

— Alan Greenspan

60. “We will have more crises and none of them will look like this because no two crises have anything in common except human nature.”

— Alan Greenspan

61. “Regulators have not been able to achieve the level of future clarity required to act pre-emptively. The problem is not lack of regulation but unrealistic expectations. What we confront in reality is uncertainty, some of it frighteningly so...”

— Alan Greenspan

62. “There are no easy choices. Easy choices are long gone.”

— Alan Greenspan

63. “We as central bankers need not be concerned if a collapsing financial asset bubble does not threaten to impair the real economy, its production, jobs and price stability.”

— Alan Greenspan

64. “It’s a bubble. It has to have intrinsic value. You have to really stretch your imagination to infer what the intrinsic value of Bitcoin is. I haven’t been able to do it. Maybe somebody else can.”

— Alan Greenspan

65. “The probability of ten consecutive heads is 0.1 percent; thus, when you have millions of coin tossers, or investors, in the end there will be thousands of very successful practitioners of coin tossing, or stock picking.”

— Alan Greenspan

66. “I’ve been in and out of Wall Street since 1949, and I’ve never seen the type of animosity between government and Wall Street. And I’m not sure where it comes from, but I suspect it’s got to do with a general schism in this society which is really becoming ever more destructive.”

— Alan Greenspan

67. “The recent evidence increasingly suggests that an economic expansion is already well under way, although an array of influences unique to this business cycle seems likely to moderate its speed.”

— Alan Greenspan

68. “If we are to remain preeminent in transforming knowledge into economic value, America’s system of higher education must remain the world’s leader in generating scientific and technological breakthrough, and in meeting the challenge to educate workers.”

— Alan Greenspan

69. “At the risk of some oversimplification, if the skill composition of our work force meshed fully with the needs of our increasingly complex capital-stock, wage-skill differentials would be stable, and the percentage changes in wage rates would be the same for all job grades.”

— Alan Greenspan

70. “I was a fairly good amateur musician, and I was an average professional. But the one thing I saw was that the big band business was fading.”

— Alan Greenspan

71. “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.”

— Alan Greenspan

72. “Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the ‘hidden’ confiscation of wealth. Gold stands in the way of this insidious process. It stands as a protector of property rights.”

— Alan Greenspan

73. “We need, in effect, to make the phantom ‘lock-boxes’ around the trust fund real.”

— Alan Greenspan

74. “I cannot conceive of a politically feasible solution to this problem which will overdo cutting the deficit, where overdoing means harming the economy. It might be technically possible, but it is not realistic.”

— Alan Greenspan

75. “Nor can private counterparties restrict supplies of gold, another commodity whose derivatives are often traded over-the-counter, where central banks stand ready to lease gold in increasing quantities should the price rise.”

— Alan Greenspan

76. “I was a good amateur but only an average professional. I soon realized that there was a limit to how far I could rise in the music business, so I left the band and enrolled at New York University.”

— Alan Greenspan

77. “You can’t have the capitalist system if an increasing number of people think it is unjust.”

— Alan Greenspan

78. “It’s hard to overemphasize how important Ford’s deregulation was. True, most of the benefits took years to unfold-rail freight rates, for example hardly budged at first. Yet deregulation set the stage for an enormous wave of creative destruction in the 1980s:...”

— Alan Greenspan

79. “Revolutions are something you see only in retrospect.”

— Alan Greenspan

80. “The free lunch has still to be invented.”

— Alan Greenspan

81. “American consumers might benefit if lenders provided greater mortgage product alternatives to the traditional fixed-rate mortgage.”

— Alan Greenspan

82. “We may be in a rapidly evolving international financial system with all the bells and whistles of the so-called new economy. But the old-economy rules of prudence are as formidable as ever. We violate them at our own peril.”

— Alan Greenspan

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

— Alan Greenspan

84. “Cash is available and we should use that in larger amounts, as is necessary, to solve the problems of the stress of this.”

— Alan Greenspan

85. “Without the triggers, that tax cut is irreponsible fiscal policy. Eventually, I think that will be the consensus view.”

— Alan Greenspan

86. “If we allow terrorism to undermine our freedom of action, we could reverse at least part of the palpable gains achieved by postwar globalization. It is incumbent upon us not to allow that to happen.”

— Alan Greenspan

87. “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.”

— Alan Greenspan

88. “I came to a stark realization: chronic surpluses could be almost as destabilizing as chronic deficits.”

— Alan Greenspan

89. “While local economies may experience significant price imbalances, a national severe price distortion seems most unlikely in the United States, given its size and diversity.”

— Alan Greenspan

90. “Developing protectionism regarding trade and our reluctance to place fiscal policy on a more sustainable path are threatening what may well be our most valued policy asset: the increased flexibility of our economy, which has fostered our extraordinary resilience to shocks.”

— Alan Greenspan

91. “Greenspan, who knew so much more than most, knew far less than most supposed...”

— Alan Greenspan

92. “Credit-default swaps, I think, have serious problems associated with them.”

— Alan Greenspan

93. “Without calling the overall national issue a bubble, it’s pretty clear that it’s an unsustainable underlying pattern.”

— Alan Greenspan

94. “The need for values is inbred. Their content is not.”

— Alan Greenspan

95. “Four decades after Thomas Edison’s spectacular illumination of Lower Manhattan in 1882, electricity had done little to make the country’s factories more productive.”

— Alan Greenspan

96. “There is nothing to guarantee the superior judgment, knowledge, and integrity of an inspector or a bureaucrat-and the deadly consequences of entrusting him with arbitrary power are obvious.”

— Alan Greenspan

97. “Improvements in lending practices driven by information technology have enabled lenders to reach out to households with previously unrecognized borrowing capacities.”

— Alan Greenspan

98. “It seems superfluous to constrain trading in some of the newer derivatives and other innovative financial contracts of the past decade. The worst have failed; investors no longer fund them and are not likely to in the future.”

— Alan Greenspan

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

— Alan Greenspan

100. “The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimated that bar code scanners at checkout counters increased the speed that cashiers could ring up payments by 30 percent and reduced labor requirements of cashiers and baggers by 10 to 15 percent.”

— Alan Greenspan