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Excessive optimism sows the seeds of its own reversal.

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
Sows
Reversal
Excessive
Optimism
Seeds

More quotes by Alan Greenspan

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An almost hysterical antagonism toward the gold standard is one issue which unites statists of all persuasions. They seem to sense... that gold and economic freedom are inseparable.
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I have long argued that paying down the national debt is beneficial for the economy: it keeps interest rates lower than they otherwise would be and frees savings to finance increases in the capital stock, thereby boosting productivity and real incomes.
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The free lunch has still to be invented.
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Productivity is notoriously difficult to predict.
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In an economy that already has lost some momentum, one must remain alert to the possibility that greater caution and weakening asset values in financial markets could signal or precipitate an excessive softening in household and business spending.
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I was a fairly good amateur musician, and I was an average professional. But the one thing I saw was that the big band business was fading.
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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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If I've made myself clear, I've misspoken.
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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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Rules cannot take the place of character.
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Revolutions are something you see only in retrospect.
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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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Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the confiscation of wealth.
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In general, corruption tends to exist whenever governments have favors to extend, or something to sell.
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There is nothing to guarantee the superior judgment, knowledge, and integrity of an inspector or a bureaucrat-and the deadly consequences of entrusting him with arbitrary power are obvious.
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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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But rules cannot substitute for character.
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Improvements in lending practices driven by information technology have enabled lenders to reach out to households with previously unrecognized borrowing capacities.
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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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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.
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