Quotes from Alan Greenspan

I'm always amazed that my wife can handle different subjects - one day politics, the next day foreign policy. And she always has so much fun doing it. We make a good team.

In general, corruption tends to exist whenever governments have favors to extend, or something to sell.

The guiding purpose of the government regulator is to prevent rather than to create something.

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

History cannot be reduced to a set of statistics and probabilities.

It's a bubble. It has to have intrinsic value. 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.

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.

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.

There is nothing to guarantee the superior judgment, knowledge, and integrity of an inspector or a bureaucrat-and the deadly consequences of entrusting him with arbitrary power are obvious.

Markets do very weird things because it reacts to how people behave, and sometimes people are a little screwy.

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.

There is a huge number of people outside our borders who would love to come here. In fact, many of them come here, get well educated, and then are required to leave... This is a factor in income inequality.

It is very difficult to predict when a bond crisis could happen.

Whatever you tax, you get less of.

The Federal Reserve is an independent agency. And that means basically that there is no other agency of government which can overrule actions that we take. So long as that is in place, and there is no evidence that the administration, or congress, or anybody else is requesting that we do things other than what we think is the appropriate thing, then what the relationships are don't frankly matter. And I've had very good relationship with presidents.

The Federal Reserve is an independent agency. And that means basically that there is no other agency of government which can overrule actions that we take. So long as that is in place, and there is no evidence that the administration, or congress, or anybody else is requesting that we do things other than what we think is the appropriate thing, then what the relationships are don't frankly matter. And I've had very good relationships with presidents.

thirty-one of the first forty U.S. Post Office pilots were killed in the first six years).

By one estimate, U.S. output per worker hour was double Germany's and five times Japan's.

It rejected the temptation to punish its opponents as the Europeans had done at Versailles, recognizing the wisdom of Herbert Hoover's advice to Harry Truman in 1946 that "you can have vengeance, or peace, but you can't have both.

Winston Churchill once said to his fellow countrymen, "We have not journeyed across the centuries, across the oceans, across the mountains, across the prairies, because we are made of sugar candy." Today, thanks to a malign combination of litigation, regulation, and pedagogical fashion, sugar-candy people are everywhere.

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

I think the whole issue of a debt ceiling makes no sense to me whatsoever. Anybody who is remotely adroit at arithmetic doesn't need a debt ceiling to tell you where you are.

I do not understand where the backing of Bitcoin is coming from. There is no fundamental issue of capabilities of repaying it in anything which is universally acceptable, which is either intrinsic value of the currency or the credit or trust of the individual who is issuing the money, whether it's a government or an individual.