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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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Alan Greenspan
Age: 98
Born: 1926
Born: March 6
Banker
Economist
Entrepreneur
Jazz Musician
Politician
New York City
New York
Print
Zero
Debt
Pay
United
Money
States
Default
Always
Probability

More quotes by Alan Greenspan

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The arts develop skills and habits of mind that are important for workers in the new economy of ideas.
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History cannot be reduced to a set of statistics and probabilities.
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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...
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All taxes are a drag on economic growth. It's only a question of degree.
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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.
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When trust is lost, a nation's ability to transact business is palpably undermined.
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The current financial crisis in the US is likely to be judged in retrospect as the most wrenching since the end of the Second World War.
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No matter how skillful the trading scheme, over the long haul, abnormal returns are sustained only through abnormal exposure to risk.
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A decline in the national housing price level would need to be substantial to trigger a significant rise in foreclosures, because the vast majority of homeowners have built up substantial equity in their homes despite large mortgage-market financed withdrawals of home equity in recent years.
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The probability of ten consecutive heads is 0.1 percent thus, when you have millions of coin tossers, or investors, in the end there will be thousands of very successful practitioners of coin tossing, or stock picking.
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Credit-default swaps, I think, have serious problems associated with them.
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Any informed borrower is simply less vulnerable to fraud and abuse.
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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.
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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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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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I came to a stark realization: chronic surpluses could be almost as destabilizing as chronic deficits.
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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.
Alan Greenspan
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The free lunch has still to be invented.
Alan Greenspan
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If prices go down, we will have problems - problems in the sense of spillover to other areas.
Alan Greenspan
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If you think you understand what I am saying you do not understand what I am saying.
Alan Greenspan