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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.

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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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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I love facts and figures. It's like following a detective story, piecing together what's going on in the economy.
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I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.
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Regulation of derivatives transactions that are privately negotiated by professionals is unnecessary.
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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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At the risk of some oversimplification, if the skill composition of our work force meshed fully with the needs of our increasingly complex capital-stock, wage-skill differentials would be stable, and the percentage changes in wage rates would be the same for all job grades.
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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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I guess I should warn you, if I turn out to be particularly clear, you've probably misunderstood what I've said.
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When trust is lost, a nation's ability to transact business is palpably undermined.
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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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I don't know where the stock market is going, but I will say this, that if it continues higher, this will do more to stimulate the economy than anything we've been talking about today or anything anybody else was talking about.
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If prices go down, we will have problems - problems in the sense of spillover to other areas.
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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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Nor can private counterparties restrict supplies of gold, another commodity whose derivatives are often traded over-the-counter, where central banks stand ready to lease gold in increasing quantities should the price rise.
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These days, even out of office, I still read economic reports.
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The economy is turning, and credit comes in with a lag, .. To the extent that a number of small firms are finding it difficult to get the credit they need at a price they can afford, that's likely to change for the better.
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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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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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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.
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The number one problem in today's generation and economy is the lack of financial literacy.
Alan Greenspan