Quotes from Alan Greenspan

Revolutions are something you see only in retrospect.

Any informed borrower is simply less vulnerable to fraud and abuse.

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.

An infectious greed seemed to grip much of our business community…. It is not that humans have become any more greedy than in generations past. It is that the avenues to express greed have grown so enormously.

Irrational exuberance

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.

Any informed borrower is simply less vulnerable to fraud and abuse.

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 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.

We need, in effect, to make the phantom 'lock-boxes' around the trust fund real.

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.

History has not dealt kindly with the aftermath of protracted periods of low risk premiums.

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 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.

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.

How do we know when irrational exuberance has unduly escalated asset values

I know that you believe you understand what you think I said, but I'm not sure you realize that what you heard is not what I meant.

There are errors in this book. I do not know where they are. If I did they wouldn't be there. But with close to two hundred thousand words my probabilistic mind tells me some are wrong.

I guess I should warn you, if I turn out to be particularly clear, you've probably misunderstood what I said.

under the gold standard, a free banking system stands as the protector of an economy's stability and balanced growth... The abandonment of the gold standard made it possible for the welfare statists to use the banking system as a means to an unlimited expansion of credit... In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation

government regulation cannot substitute for individual integrity.

Capitalism is based on self-interest and self-esteem; it holds integrity and trustworthiness as cardinal virtues and makes them pay off in the marketplace, thus demanding that men survive by means of virtue, not vices. It is this superlatively moral system that the welfare statists propose to improve upon by means of preventative law, snooping bureaucrats, and the chronic goad of fear.

If I seem unduly clear to you, you must have misunderstood what I said. -- Speaking to a Senate Committee in 1987, as quoted in the Guardian Weekly, November 4, 2005.

People do not realize in [the U.S], for example, how tenuous our ties to international energy are. That is, we on a daily basis require continuous flow. If that flow is shut off, it causes catastrophic effects in the industrial world. And it's that which made [Saddam Hussein] far more important to get out than bin Laden.