Quotes from Alan Greenspan

The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimated that bar code scanners at checkout counters increased the speed that cashiers could ring up payments by 30 percent and reduced labor requirements of cashiers and baggers by 10 to 15 percent.

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.

John Jacob Astor succeeded in amassing America's biggest fortune by trading in the furs of beavers, otters, muskrats, and bears (though he wisely used some of the money he made from hunting in America's great wilderness to buy real estate in Manhattan).

We had a bubble in housing.

Four decades after Thomas Edison's spectacular illumination of Lower Manhattan in 1882, electricity had done little to make the country's factories more productive.

More than 90 percent of Americans lived in the countryside, either on farms or plantations. Only three cities, Philadelphia, Boston, and New York, had populations of more than 16,000, making them flyspecks compared with London (750,000) or Peking (almost 3 million).6

A study of a cohort of 4,800 African Americans born between 1952 and 1982 shows that, as they grew into adults, 69 percent of the cohort remain in the same county, 82 percent remain in the same state, and 90 percent remain in the same region. The figures for the previous generation were 50 percent, 65 percent, and 74 percent.

The big three television companies (CBS, ABC, and NBC) measured their audiences in tens of millions: when CBS broadcast the episode of I Love Lucy in which Lucy had a baby to coincide with the actress who played Lucy, Lucille Ball, also having a baby, on January 19, 1953, 68.8 percent of the country's television sets were tuned in, a far higher proportion than were tuned in to Dwight Eisenhower's inauguration the following day.

America's share of the world's patents has increased from 10 percent when Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980 to 20 percent today.

I know you think you understand what you thought I said , but I'm not sure realized that what you heard isn't what I meant

I know you think you understand what you thought I said , but I'm not sure you realize that what you heard isn't what I meant

In the nineteenth century, the population multiplied by a factor of almost fifteen, from 5.3 million to 76 million, a total larger than any European country except Russia. By 1890, 80 percent of New York's citizens were immigrants or the children of immigrants, as were 87 percent of Chicago's.

The population of the Pacific states increased by 110 percent from 1940 to 1960.

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

America's genius lay in three things that are rather more subtle than invention: making innovations more user friendly; producing companies that can commercialize these innovations; and developing techniques for running these companies successfully.

Slave owners invested a growing amount of capital in their slaves: by 1861, almost half the total value of the South's capital assets was in the "value of negroes.

The James Hills and J.P. Morgans are an affront to a society dedicated to the worship of mediocrity.

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

Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the 'hidden' confiscation of wealth. Gold stands in the way of this insidious process. It stands as a protector of property rights.

As long as we issue fiat currency, I see no alternative to a legal tender law.

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.

Protectionism will do little to create jobs and if foreigners retaliate, we will surely lose jobs.

Anything that we can do to raise personal savings is very much in the interest of this country.