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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
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Politician
New York City
New York
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More quotes by Alan Greenspan

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It seems superfluous to constrain trading in some of the newer derivatives and other innovative financial contracts of the past decade. The worst have failed investors no longer fund them and are not likely to in the future.
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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But rules cannot substitute for character.
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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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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History cannot be reduced to a set of statistics and probabilities.
Alan Greenspan
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Improvements in lending practices driven by information technology have enabled lenders to reach out to households with previously unrecognized borrowing capacities.
Alan Greenspan
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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.
Alan Greenspan
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[Republicans] swapped principle for power. They ended up with neither. They deserved to lose.
Alan Greenspan
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I'm a plain soap kind of guy.
Alan Greenspan
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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.
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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We as central bankers need not be concerned if a collapsing financial asset bubble does not threaten to impair the real economy, its production, jobs and price stability.
Alan Greenspan
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It's a bubble. It has to have intrinsic value. You have to really stretch your imagination to infer what the intrinsic value of Bitcoin is. I haven't been able to do it. Maybe somebody else can.
Alan Greenspan
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Regulation of derivatives transactions that are privately negotiated by professionals is unnecessary.
Alan Greenspan
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The United States can pay any debt it has because we can always print money to do that. So there is zero probability of default.
Alan Greenspan
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Productivity is notoriously difficult to predict.
Alan Greenspan
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Even though some down payments are borrowed, it would take a large, and historically most unusual, fall in home prices to wipe out a significant part of home equity. Many of those who purchased their residence more than a year ago have equity buffers in their homes adequate to withstand any price decline other than a very deep one.
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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Regulators have not been able to achieve the level of future clarity required to act pre-emptively. The problem is not lack of regulation but unrealistic expectations. What we confront in reality is uncertainty, some of it frighteningly so...
Alan Greenspan