Alan Greenspan
Alan Greenspan
Alan Greenspanis an American economist who served as Chairman of the Federal Reserve of the United States from 1987 to 2006. He currently works as a private adviser and provides consulting for firms through his company, Greenspan Associates LLC. First appointed Federal Reserve chairman by President Ronald Reagan in August 1987, he was reappointed at successive four-year intervals until retiring on January 31, 2006, after the second-longest tenure in the position...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionEconomist
Date of Birth6 March 1926
CityNew York City, NY
CountryUnited States of America
We can guarantee cash benefits as far out and at whatever size you like, but we cannot guarantee their purchasing power.
Although the outlook is clouded by a number of uncertainties, the central tendencies of the projections .. imply continued good economic performance in the United States.
There are no easy choices. Easy choices are long gone.
We cannot rule out a situation in which a preemptive policy tightening becomes necessary, ... Such caution seems especially warranted with regard to the sharp rise in equity prices during the past two years. These gains have obviously raised questions of sustainability.
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.
Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the confiscation of wealth.
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.
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.
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.
Productivity is notoriously difficult to predict.
Amateurs want to be right. Professionals want to make money.
And whatever their publicized angst over Saddam Hussein's 'weapons of mass destruction,' American and British authorities were also concerned about violence in an area that harbors a resource indispensable for the functioning of the word economy. ... I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.
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.
The only sustainable way to increase demand for vacant houses is to spur the formation of new households. Admitting more skilled immigrants, who tend to earn enough to buy homes, would accomplish that while paying other dividends to the U.S. economy.