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Rules cannot take the place of character.

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
Rules
Place
Cannot
Character
Take

More quotes by 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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We can guarantee cash benefits as far out and at whatever size you like, but we cannot guarantee their purchasing power.
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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I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.
Alan Greenspan
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Anyone willing to do what is required to become president of the United States is thereby barred from taking that office. I'm only half joking
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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...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.
Alan Greenspan
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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.
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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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.
Alan Greenspan
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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.
Alan Greenspan
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There is no evidence that the business cycle has been repealed.
Alan Greenspan
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Productivity is notoriously difficult to predict.
Alan Greenspan
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A decline in the national housing price level would need to be substantial to trigger a significant rise in foreclosures, because the vast majority of homeowners have built up substantial equity in their homes despite large mortgage-market financed withdrawals of home equity in recent years.
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 free lunch has still to be invented.
Alan Greenspan
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I'm not denying that monopolies are terrible things, but I am denying that it is readily easy to resolve them through legislation of that nature.
Alan Greenspan
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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.
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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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