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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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If prices go down, we will have problems - problems in the sense of spillover to other areas.
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If I've made myself clear, I've misspoken.
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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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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
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Any informed borrower is simply less vulnerable to fraud and abuse.
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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.
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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.
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I came to a stark realization: chronic surpluses could be almost as destabilizing as chronic deficits.
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The only sustainable way to increase demand for vacant houses is to spur the formation of new households. Admitting more skilled immigrants, who tend to earn enough to buy homes, would accomplish that while paying other dividends to the U.S. economy.
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The gut-feel of the 55-year old trader is more important than the mathematical elegance of the 25-year old genius.
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I'm a plain soap kind of guy.
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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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The process of innovation is, of course, never ending.
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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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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.
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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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In general, corruption tends to exist whenever governments have favors to extend, or something to sell.
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Regulation of derivatives transactions that are privately negotiated by professionals is unnecessary.
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Corruption, embezzlement, fraud, these are all characteristics which exist everywhere. It is regrettably the way human nature functions, whether we like it or not. What successful economies do is keep it to a minimum. No one has ever eliminated any of that stuff.
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