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If you get beyond the political rhetoric [and assembled a group to solve Social Security] it would take them 15 minutes. It would take them 15 minutes only because 10 minutes was used for pleasantries.

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
Political
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Security
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More quotes by 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
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Without the triggers, that tax cut is irreponsible fiscal policy. Eventually, I think that will be the consensus view.
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This decade is strewn with examples of bright people who thought they built a better mousetrap that could consistently extract abnormal returns from the financial markets. Some succeed for a time. But while there may occasionally be mis-configurations among market prices that allow abnormal returns, they do not persist.
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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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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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We can guarantee cash benefits as far out and at whatever size you like, but we cannot guarantee their purchasing power.
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In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation. There is no safe store of value.
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Now, I only play very occasionally, and in fact, more piano than clarinet or sax.
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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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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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All taxes are a drag on economic growth. It's only a question of degree.
Alan Greenspan
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If you think you understand what I am saying you do not understand what I am saying.
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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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Regulation of derivatives transactions that are privately negotiated by professionals is unnecessary.
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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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The process of innovation is, of course, never ending.
Alan Greenspan
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But rules cannot substitute for character.
Alan Greenspan
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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.
Alan Greenspan
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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.
Alan Greenspan