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Before I met Ayn Rand, I was a logical positivist, and accordingly, I didn't believe in absolutes, moral or otherwise. If I couldn't prove a proposition with facts and figures, it was without merit.

Alan Greenspan

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Alan Greenspan
Age: 98
Born: 1926
Born: March 6
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More quotes by Alan Greenspan

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Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the confiscation of wealth.
Alan Greenspan
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Protectionism will do little to create jobs and if foreigners retaliate, we will surely lose jobs.
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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Productivity is notoriously difficult to predict.
Alan Greenspan
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History cannot be reduced to a set of statistics and probabilities.
Alan Greenspan
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These days, even out of office, I still read economic reports.
Alan Greenspan
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Without the triggers, that tax cut is irreponsible fiscal policy. Eventually, I think that will be the consensus view.
Alan Greenspan
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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.
Alan Greenspan
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Any onset of increased investor caution elevates risk premiums and, as a consequence, lowers asset values and promotes the liquidation of the debt that supported higher asset prices, ... This is the reason that history has not dealt kindly with the aftermath of protracted periods of low risk premiums.
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 tub helps me relax, and it's a great place to read.
Alan Greenspan
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The free lunch has still to be invented.
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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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.
Alan Greenspan
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The guiding purpose of the government regulator is to prevent rather than to create something.
Alan Greenspan
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I've been in and out of Wall Street since 1949, and I've never seen the type of animosity between government and Wall Street. And I'm not sure where it comes from, but I suspect it's got to do with a general schism in this society which is really becoming ever more destructive.
Alan Greenspan
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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.
Alan Greenspan
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What an ideology is is a conceptual framework with the way people deal with reality. Everyone has one. You have to, to exist you need an ideology. The question is whether it is accurate or not.
Alan Greenspan
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There are no easy choices. Easy choices are long gone.
Alan Greenspan
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The recent evidence increasingly suggests that an economic expansion is already well under way, although an array of influences unique to this business cycle seems likely to moderate its speed.
Alan Greenspan