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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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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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Even though some down payments are borrowed, it would take a large, and historically most unusual, fall in home prices to wipe out a significant part of home equity. Many of those who purchased their residence more than a year ago have equity buffers in their homes adequate to withstand any price decline other than a very deep one.
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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.
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When trust is lost, a nation's ability to transact business is palpably undermined.
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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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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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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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If I say something which you understand fully in this regard, I probably made a mistake.
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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.
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It's a bubble. It has to have intrinsic value. You have to really stretch your imagination to infer what the intrinsic value of Bitcoin is. I haven't been able to do it. Maybe somebody else can.
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History cannot be reduced to a set of statistics and probabilities.
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Credit-default swaps, I think, have serious problems associated with them.
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Regulation - which is based on force and fear - undermines the moral base of business dealings. It becomes cheaper to bribe a building inspector than to meet his standards of construction. Protection of the consumer by regulation is thus illusory.
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We cannot rule out a situation in which a preemptive policy tightening becomes necessary, ... Such caution seems especially warranted with regard to the sharp rise in equity prices during the past two years. These gains have obviously raised questions of sustainability.
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The free lunch has still to be invented.
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Excessive optimism sows the seeds of its own reversal.
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I love to play tennis and golf, listen to music, watch baseball and root for the Redskins.
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The process of innovation is, of course, never ending.
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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.
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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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