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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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The tub helps me relax, and it's a great place to read.
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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There is no evidence that the business cycle has been repealed.
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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As long as we issue fiat currency, I see no alternative to a legal tender law.
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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Whatever you tax you get less of.
Alan Greenspan
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Revolutions are something you see only in retrospect.
Alan Greenspan
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If I've made myself clear, I've misspoken.
Alan Greenspan
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The arts develop skills and habits of mind that are important for workers in the new economy of ideas.
Alan Greenspan
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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.
Alan Greenspan
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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.
Alan Greenspan
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It is decidedly not true that nice guys finish last, as that highly original American baseball philosopher, Leo Durocher, was alleged to have said.
Alan Greenspan
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When trust is lost, a nation's ability to transact business is palpably undermined.
Alan Greenspan
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There is nothing to guarantee the superior judgment, knowledge, and integrity of an inspector or a bureaucrat-and the deadly consequences of entrusting him with arbitrary power are obvious.
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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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.
Alan Greenspan
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This decade is strewn with examples of bright people who thought they built a better mousetrap that could consistently extract abnormal returns from the financial markets. Some succeed for a time. But while there may occasionally be mis-configurations among market prices that allow abnormal returns, they do not persist.
Alan Greenspan
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Indeed, better risk management may be the only truly necessary element of success in banking.
Alan Greenspan
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Cash is available and we should use that in larger amounts, as is necessary, to solve the problems of the stress of this.
Alan Greenspan