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
The true measure of a career is to be able to be content, even proud, that you succeeded through your own endeavors without leaving a trail of casualties in your wake.
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.
Diplomacy is really far less important than the stock movements within Russia.
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.
I get so engaged when I have a problem you cannot solve that I just cannot break away from what I am doing - I keep thinking and thinking and cannot stop.
The only way you get economic progress, real standards of living moving higher, is to have the savings of the society continuously invested in the cutting-edge technologies. And those technologies which are obsolescent get dropped out.
The problems that we have seen are, in one sense, more domestic than they are international,
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,
The extent and pace of recovery of Asian economies currently experiencing a severe downturn will have important ramifications for prices of energy and other commodities, the strength of the dollar, and competitive conditions on world product markets,
The Fact that our economical models at The Fed, the best in the world, have been wrong for fourteen straight quarters, does not mean they will not be right in the fifteenth quarter
The demand for new computer applications will no doubt continue to spur demand for those with the creativity and the higher-level conceptual skills that will enable us to increasingly harness technology to produce greater economic value,