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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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Alan Greenspan
Age: 98
Born: 1926
Born: March 6
Banker
Economist
Entrepreneur
Jazz Musician
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New York City
New York
Drag
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Taxes
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More quotes by Alan Greenspan

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What we have found over the years in the marketplace is that derivatives have been an extraordinarily useful vehicle to transfer risk from those who shouldn't be taking it to those who are willing to and are capable of doing so.
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The probability of ten consecutive heads is 0.1 percent thus, when you have millions of coin tossers, or investors, in the end there will be thousands of very successful practitioners of coin tossing, or stock picking.
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But rules cannot substitute for character.
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I'm a plain soap kind of guy.
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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.
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Regulation of derivatives transactions that are privately negotiated by professionals is unnecessary.
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The arts develop skills and habits of mind that are important for workers in the new economy of ideas.
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Excessive optimism sows the seeds of its own reversal.
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[Republicans] swapped principle for power. They ended up with neither. They deserved to lose.
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I believe that the general growth in large [financial] institutions have occurred in the context of an underlying structure of markets in which many of the larger risks are dramatically -- I should say, fully -- hedged.
Alan Greenspan
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Regulation - which is based on force and fear - undermines the moral base of business dealings. It becomes cheaper to bribe a building inspector than to meet his standards of construction. Protection of the consumer by regulation is thus illusory.
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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.
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Greenspan, who knew so much more than most, knew far less than most supposed.
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...our market system depends critically on trust-trust in the word of our colleagues and trust in the word of those with whom we do business.
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Crony capitalism is essentially a condition in which... public officials are giving favours to people in the private sector in payment of political favours.
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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.
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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.
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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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The guiding purpose of the government regulator is to prevent rather than to create something.
Alan Greenspan
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Credit-default swaps, I think, have serious problems associated with them.
Alan Greenspan