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I came to a stark realization: chronic surpluses could be almost as destabilizing as chronic deficits.

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
Surplus
Deficit
Realization
Surpluses
Almost
Destabilizing
Came
Deficits
Starks
Stark
Chronic

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Revolutions are something you see only in retrospect.
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Stripped of its academic jargon, the welfare state is nothing more than a mechanism by which governments confiscate the wealth of the productive members of a society to support a wide variety of welfare schemes.
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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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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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Any informed borrower is simply less vulnerable to fraud and abuse.
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People dont realize that we cannot forecast the future. What we can do is have probabilities of what causes what, but thats as far as we go. And Ive had a very successful career as a forecaster, starting in 1948 forward. The number of mistakes I have made are just awesome. There is no number large enough to account for that.
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History demonstrates that participants in financial markets are susceptible to waves of optimism. Excessive optimism shows the seeds of its own reversal in the form of imbalances that tend to grow over time.
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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.
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I'm always amazed that my wife can handle different subjects - one day politics, the next day foreign policy. And she always has so much fun doing it. We make a good team.
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When trust is lost, a nation's ability to transact business is palpably undermined.
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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.
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Remember what we're looking at. Gold is a currency. It is still, by all evidence, a premier currency, that no fiat currency, including the dollar, can match.
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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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I do not deny that many appear to have succeeded in a material way by cutting corners and by manipulating associates, both in their professional and in their personal lives. But material success is possible in this world and far more satisfying when it comes without exploiting others.
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Without calling the overall national issue a bubble, it's pretty clear that it's an unsustainable underlying pattern.
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Anything that we can do to raise personal savings is very much in the interest of this country.
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