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I guess I should warn you, if I turn out to be particularly clear, you've probably misunderstood what I've said.

Alan Greenspan

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Alan Greenspan
Age: 98
Born: 1926
Born: March 6
Banker
Economist
Entrepreneur
Jazz Musician
Politician
New York City
New York
Turn
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Warn
Misunderstood
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Guess

More quotes by Alan Greenspan

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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?
Alan Greenspan
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Without calling the overall national issue a bubble, it's pretty clear that it's an unsustainable underlying pattern.
Alan Greenspan
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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
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There is no evidence that the business cycle has been repealed.
Alan Greenspan
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If prices go down, we will have problems - problems in the sense of spillover to other areas.
Alan Greenspan
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If you get beyond the political rhetoric [and assembled a group to solve Social Security] it would take them 15 minutes. It would take them 15 minutes only because 10 minutes was used for pleasantries.
Alan Greenspan
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If I say something which you understand fully in this regard, I probably made a mistake.
Alan Greenspan
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Institutions of the newer participants in global finance had not been tested, until recently...recent crisis have underscored certain financial structure vulnerabilities that are not readily assuaged in the short run.
Alan Greenspan
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Remember what we're looking at. Gold is a currency. It is still, by all evidence, a premier currency, that no fiat currency, including the dollar, can match.
Alan Greenspan
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All taxes are a drag on economic growth. It's only a question of degree.
Alan Greenspan
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Stripped of its academic jargon, the welfare state is nothing more than a mechanism by which governments confiscate the wealth of the productive members of a society to support a wide variety of welfare schemes.
Alan Greenspan
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The current financial crisis in the US is likely to be judged in retrospect as the most wrenching since the end of the Second World War.
Alan Greenspan
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Look, I'm very much in favor of tax cuts, but not with borrowed money. And the problem that we've gotten into in recent years is spending programs with borrowed money, tax cuts with borrowed money, and at the end of the day that proves disastrous. And my view is I don't think we can play subtle policy here.
Alan Greenspan
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To succeed, you will soon learn, as I did, the importance of a solid foundation in the basics of education - literacy, both verbal and numerical, and communication skills.
Alan Greenspan
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Credit-default swaps, I think, have serious problems associated with them.
Alan Greenspan
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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
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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.
Alan Greenspan
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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
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Since I've become a central banker, I've learned to mumble with great incoherence. If I seem unduly clear to you, you must have misunderstood what I said.
Alan Greenspan
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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.
Alan Greenspan