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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.

Alan Greenspan

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Alan Greenspan
Age: 98
Born: 1926
Born: March 6
Banker
Economist
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Jazz Musician
Politician
New York City
New York
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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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In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation. There is no safe store of value.
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Excessive optimism sows the seeds of its own reversal.
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[Republicans] swapped principle for power. They ended up with neither. They deserved to lose.
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Anything that we can do to raise personal savings is very much in the interest of this country.
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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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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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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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Indeed, better risk management may be the only truly necessary element of success in banking.
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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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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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In general, corruption tends to exist whenever governments have favors to extend, or something to sell.
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Well, you probably will always believe there should be laws against fraud, and I don't think there is any need for a law against fraud.
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It is decidedly not true that nice guys finish last, as that highly original American baseball philosopher, Leo Durocher, was alleged to have said.
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