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
I must say, I never expected to see the day where I would be talking about anything other than reducing the debt, I'm running into the tyranny of zero, which is where you can't reduce (the debt) any more
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.
Fear and euphoria are dominant forces, and fear is many multiples the size of euphoria. Bubbles go up very slowly as euphoria builds. Then fear hits, and it comes down very sharply. When I started to look at that, I was sort of intellectually shocked. Contagion is the critical phenomenon which causes the thing to fall apart.
You can't have the capitalist system if an increasing number of people think it is unjust.
We ought to be opening up our borders to skilled labour from all parts of the world because [the state of the world is as follows: ] if we were to do that we would increase the supply of skilled workers that our schools have been unable to create and as a consequence of that we would lower the average wage of skills and reduce the degree of income inequality in this country.
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?
The economy is turning, and credit comes in with a lag, .. To the extent that a number of small firms are finding it difficult to get the credit they need at a price they can afford, that's likely to change for the better.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The very nature of finance is that it cannot be profitable unless it is significantly leveraged... and as long as there is debt, there can be failure and contagion.