Alan Greenspan
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.Collection: Finance
Finance is wholly different from the rest the economy.Collection: Finance
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.Collection: Nature
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.Collection: Imagination
Fear and euphoria are dominant forces, and fear is many multiples the size of euphoria. Bubbles go up very slowly as euphoria builds. Then fear hits, and it comes down very sharply. When I started to look at that, I was sort of intellectually shocked. Contagion is the critical phenomenon which causes the thing to fall apart.Collection: Fear
Fear is a far more dominant force in human behaviour than euphoria - I would never have expected that or given it a moment's thought before, but it shows up in the data in so many ways.Collection: Fear
Unless you are willing to compromise, society cannot live together.Collection: Society
The person I liked the best was Gerald R. Ford. He was the most decent man in politics I ever had any relationships with.Collection: Politics
History has not dealt kindly with the aftermath of protracted periods of low risk premiums.Collection: History
We need, in effect, to make the phantom 'lock-boxes' around the trust fund real.Collection: Trust
The United States can pay any debt it has because we can always print money to do that. So there is zero probability of default.Collection: Money
Forecasting our futures is built into our psyches because we will soon have to manage that future. We have no choice. No matter how often we fail, we can never stop trying.Collection: Future
Any informed borrower is simply less vulnerable to fraud and abuse.Collection: Finance
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.Collection: Finance
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.Collection: Communication
If I turn out to be particularly clear, you've probably misunderstood what I've said.
Bitcoin is really a fascinating example of how human beings create value, and is not always rational... tt is not a rational currency in that case.
There are winners and there are losers. And as much as we would like to help the losers, if we do it in the way that directs the limited capital of the society to support the low-productivity parts of the economy, it means that the rest of the economy - our overall standard of living - will not rise as much as it could.
People don't realize that we cannot forecast the future. What we can do is have probabilities of what causes what, but that's as far as we go. And I've had a very successful career as a forecaster, starting in 1948 forward. The number of mistakes I have made are just awesome. There is no number large enough to account for that.
We really can't forecast all that well, and yet we pretend that we can, but we really can't.
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.
Whatever you tax, you get less of.
I guess I should warn you, if I turn out to be particularly clear, you've probably misunderstood what I've said.
What a sound money system does is to stabilize all the elements in it, and reduces the uncertainty that people confront. And the one thing all human beings do when they are confronted with uncertainty is pull back, withdraw, disengage, and that means economic activity, which is really dealing with people, just goes straight down.
Revolutions are something you see only in retrospect.
I stated that I'm a libertarian Republican, which means I believe in a series of issues, such as smaller government, constraint on budget deficits, free markets, globalization, and a whole series of other things, including welfare reform.
Europe is very critical to the United States in the sense not only do we have a fourth of our exports there, but more importantly, a significant proportion of the foreign affiliate profits in fact, half of U.S. corporations, are in Europe.
There is a limit to how much the United States Treasury can borrow.
The only way to have several currencies from divergent nations lumped together is if they are culturally close, such as Germany, the Netherlands and Austria. If they aren't, it simply can't continue to work.
I was a good amateur but only an average professional. I soon realized that there was a limit to how far I could rise in the music business, so I left the band and enrolled at New York University.
I've always considered myself more of a mathematician than a psychologist.
I've been in and out of Wall Street since 1949, and I've never seen the type of animosity between government and Wall Street. And I'm not sure where it comes from, but I suspect it's got to do with a general schism in this society which is really becoming ever more destructive.
Anything that we can do to raise personal savings is very much in the interest of this country.
Protectionism will do little to create jobs and if foreigners retaliate, we will surely lose jobs.
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.
I always believed in animal spirits. It's not their existence that is new. It's the fact that they are not random events, but actually replicate in-bred qualities of human nature which create those animal spirits.
It's hard to tell which assets will be toxic. The best way to ensure that only shareholders and banks feel it is have adequate capital.
Much fiscal policy is implemented, not through spending increases, but through tax credits and other so-called tax expenditures. The markets should respond to them as they do spending cuts, with little contraction in economic activity.
I'm a free-market economist from years and years back, and I've never veered from that.
It's only when the markets are perceived to have exhausted themselves on the downside that they turn. Trying to prevent them from going down just merely prolongs the agony.
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.
The true measure of a career is to be able to be content, even proud, that you succeeded through your own endeavors without leaving a trail of casualties in your wake.
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.
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.
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.
I'm not denying that monopolies are terrible things, but I am denying that it is readily easy to resolve them through legislation of that nature.
I get so engaged when I have a problem you cannot solve that I just cannot break away from what I am doing - I keep thinking and thinking and cannot stop.
The only way you get economic progress, real standards of living moving higher, is to have the savings of the society continuously invested in the cutting-edge technologies. And those technologies which are obsolescent get dropped out.
Markets do very weird things because it reacts to how people behave, and sometimes people are a little screwy.
The only thing that was economic, I might say, about my music career, aside from the fact that I did everybody's tax returns in the band, was the decision I made to leave the music business on economic grounds.