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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.

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
Failure
Unless
Nature
Leveraged
Cannot
Contagion
Long
Significantly
Profitable
Finance
Debt

More quotes by Alan Greenspan

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If you get beyond the political rhetoric [and assembled a group to solve Social Security] it would take them 15 minutes. It would take them 15 minutes only because 10 minutes was used for pleasantries.
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The number one problem in today's generation and economy is the lack of financial literacy.
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Greenspan, who knew so much more than most, knew far less than most supposed.
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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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Before I met Ayn Rand, I was a logical positivist, and accordingly, I didn't believe in absolutes, moral or otherwise. If I couldn't prove a proposition with facts and figures, it was without merit.
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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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Without the triggers, that tax cut is irreponsible fiscal policy. Eventually, I think that will be the consensus view.
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It seems superfluous to constrain trading in some of the newer derivatives and other innovative financial contracts of the past decade. The worst have failed investors no longer fund them and are not likely to in the future.
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[Republicans] swapped principle for power. They ended up with neither. They deserved to lose.
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While local economies may experience significant price imbalances, a national severe price distortion seems most unlikely in the United States, given its size and diversity.
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Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the confiscation of wealth.
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History has not dealt kindly with the aftermath of protracted periods of low risk premiums.
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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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This decade is strewn with examples of bright people who thought they built a better mousetrap that could consistently extract abnormal returns from the financial markets. Some succeed for a time. But while there may occasionally be mis-configurations among market prices that allow abnormal returns, they do not persist.
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If all currencies are moving up or down together, the question is: relative to what? Gold is the canary in the coal mine. It signals problems with respect to currency markets. Central banks should pay attention to it.
Alan Greenspan
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I came to a stark realization: chronic surpluses could be almost as destabilizing as chronic deficits.
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By far the most significant event in finance during the past decade has been the extraordinary development and expansion of financial derivatives.
Alan Greenspan
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We need, in effect, to make the phantom 'lock-boxes' around the trust fund real.
Alan Greenspan
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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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What an ideology is is a conceptual framework with the way people deal with reality. Everyone has one. You have to, to exist you need an ideology. The question is whether it is accurate or not.
Alan Greenspan