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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.

Alan Greenspan

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

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Protectionism will do little to create jobs and if foreigners retaliate, we will surely lose jobs.
Alan Greenspan
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Although the outlook is clouded by a number of uncertainties, the central tendencies of the projections .. imply continued good economic performance in the United States.
Alan Greenspan
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But rules cannot substitute for character.
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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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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What we have found over the years in the marketplace is that derivatives have been an extraordinarily useful vehicle to transfer risk from those who shouldn't be taking it to those who are willing to and are capable of doing so.
Alan Greenspan
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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.
Alan Greenspan
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The very nature of finance is that it cannot be profitable unless it is significantly leveraged... and as long as there is debt, there can be failure and contagion.
Alan Greenspan
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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.
Alan Greenspan
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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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It's hard to overemphasize how important Ford's deregulation was. True, most of the benefits took years to unfold-rail freight rates, for example hardly budged at first. Yet deregulation set the stage for an enormous wave of creative destruction in the 1980s.
Alan Greenspan
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Without the triggers, that tax cut is irreponsible fiscal policy. Eventually, I think that will be the consensus view.
Alan Greenspan
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To succeed, you will soon learn, as I did, the importance of a solid foundation in the basics of education - literacy, both verbal and numerical, and communication skills.
Alan Greenspan
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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.
Alan Greenspan
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American consumers might benefit if lenders provided greater mortgage product alternatives to the traditional fixed-rate mortgage.
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
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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.
Alan Greenspan
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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.
Alan Greenspan
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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.
Alan Greenspan
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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.
Alan Greenspan