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
It's only when the markets are perceived to have exhausted themselves on the downside that they turn. Trying to prevent them from going down just merely prolongs the agony.
I think the whole issue of a debt ceiling makes no sense to me whatsoever. Anybody who is remotely adroit at arithmetic doesn't need a debt ceiling to tell you where you are.
Much fiscal policy is implemented, not through spending increases, but through tax credits and other so-called tax expenditures. The markets should respond to them as they do spending cuts, with little contraction in economic activity.
One of the major problems with China is that its innovation is largely borrowed technology.
Since 1948 I have spent every single day thinking how the economic and political worlds have changed.
There is a limit to how much the United States Treasury can borrow.
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.
The rapid growth and increasing importance of derivative instruments in the risk profile of many large banks has been a particular concern,
The rates of return on investment in the same new technologies are correspondingly less in Europe and Japan because businesses there face higher costs of displacing workers than we do, ... Moreover, because our costs of dismissing workers are lower, the potential costs of hiring and the risks associated with expanding employment are less.
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.
the pressure to enlarge the pool of skilled workers also requires that we strengthen the significant contributions of other types of training and educational programs, especially for those with lesser skills.
We have a very special mission. We are in charge of the nation's currency and the central bank, because of that, is involved in everyone's daily lives. We are the guardians of their purchasing power.
When we see significant, dramatic changes ... we are skeptical as indeed we should be, ... bring together all of the facts we can marshal and the most sophisticated insights to explain those facts that we can.
We need ... to be aware that our front-loaded policy actions this year, coupled with the tax cuts under way, should be increasingly affecting economic activity as the year progresses,