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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
Stark
Chronic
Surplus
Deficit
Realization
Surpluses
Almost
Destabilizing
Came
Deficits
Starks

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Revolutions are something you see only in retrospect.
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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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I love facts and figures. It's like following a detective story, piecing together what's going on in the economy.
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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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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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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.
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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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It is decidedly not true that nice guys finish last, as that highly original American baseball philosopher, Leo Durocher, was alleged to have said.
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History cannot be reduced to a set of statistics and probabilities.
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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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I have found no greater satisfaction than achieving success through honest dealing and strict adherence to the view that, for you to gain, those you deal with should gain as well.
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If I've made myself clear, I've misspoken.
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In general, corruption tends to exist whenever governments have favors to extend, or something to sell.
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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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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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By far the most significant event in finance during the past decade has been the extraordinary development and expansion of financial derivatives.
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The recent evidence increasingly suggests that an economic expansion is already well under way, although an array of influences unique to this business cycle seems likely to moderate its speed.
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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
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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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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.
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