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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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Alan Greenspan
Age: 98
Born: 1926
Born: March 6
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New York City
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More quotes by Alan Greenspan

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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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I'm a better economist than I was a sax player.
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Greenspan, who knew so much more than most, knew far less than most supposed.
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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.
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I was a fairly good amateur musician, and I was an average professional. But the one thing I saw was that the big band business was fading.
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Look, I'm very much in favor of tax cuts, but not with borrowed money. And the problem that we've gotten into in recent years is spending programs with borrowed money, tax cuts with borrowed money, and at the end of the day that proves disastrous. And my view is I don't think we can play subtle policy here.
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I've been in and out of Wall Street since 1949, and I've never seen the type of animosity between government and Wall Street. And I'm not sure where it comes from, but I suspect it's got to do with a general schism in this society which is really becoming ever more destructive.
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It has been my experience that competency in mathematics, both in numerical manipulations and in understanding its conceptual foundations, enhances a person's ability to handle the more ambiguous and qualitative relationships that dominate our day-to-day financial decision-making
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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.
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The more flexible an economy, the greater its ability to self-correct in response to inevitable, often unanticipated, disturbances and thus to contain the size and consequences of cyclical imbalances.
Alan Greenspan
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History cannot be reduced to a set of statistics and probabilities.
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Rules cannot take the place of character.
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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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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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Any onset of increased investor caution elevates risk premiums and, as a consequence, lowers asset values and promotes the liquidation of the debt that supported higher asset prices, ... This is the reason that history has not dealt kindly with the aftermath of protracted periods of low risk premiums.
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We need, in effect, to make the phantom 'lock-boxes' around the trust fund real.
Alan Greenspan
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The number one problem in today's generation and economy is the lack of financial literacy.
Alan Greenspan
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How do we know when irrational exuberance has unduly escalated asset values?
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We will have more crises and none of them will look like this because no two crises have anything in common except human nature.
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As long as we issue fiat currency, I see no alternative to a legal tender law.
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