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Productivity is notoriously difficult to predict.

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
Difficult
Notoriously
Predict
Productivity

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?
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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.
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I was a good amateur but only an average professional. I soon realized that there was a limit to how far I could rise in the music business, so I left the band and enrolled at New York University.
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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.
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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.
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These days, even out of office, I still read economic reports.
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Protectionism will do little to create jobs and if foreigners retaliate, we will surely lose jobs.
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Regulation of derivatives transactions that are privately negotiated by professionals is unnecessary.
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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.
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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.
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Well, you probably will always believe there should be laws against fraud, and I don't think there is any need for a law against fraud.
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We will have more crises and none of them will look like this because no two crises have anything in common except human nature.
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Corruption, embezzlement, fraud, these are all characteristics which exist everywhere. It is regrettably the way human nature functions, whether we like it or not. What successful economies do is keep it to a minimum. No one has ever eliminated any of that stuff.
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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
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The gut-feel of the 55-year old trader is more important than the mathematical elegance of the 25-year old genius.
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Gold, unlike all other commodities, is a currency...and the major thrust in the demand for gold is not for jewelry. It's not for anything other than an escape from what is perceived to be a fiat money system, paper money, that seems to be deteriorating.
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I love to play tennis and golf, listen to music, watch baseball and root for the Redskins.
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I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.
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No matter how skillful the trading scheme, over the long haul, abnormal returns are sustained only through abnormal exposure to risk.
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I cannot conceive of a politically feasible solution to this problem which will overdo cutting the deficit, where overdoing means harming the economy. It might be technically possible, but it is not realistic.
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