Quotes from Alan Greenspan

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.

Manufacturing capacity is not a rigid level against which one bounces. When you are dealing with a world economy, with a flexibility to employ production facilities other than one's own, then the concept of capacity is vaguer.

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.

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.

Finance is wholly different from the rest the economy.

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.

When you go back and look at American history, it's not terribly different from Canadian history. If you weren't self-reliant on the prairie, you wouldn't survive.

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.

There's no other job in public life that is like chairman of the Fed.

Crony capitalism is essentially a condition in which... public officials are giving favours to people in the private sector in payment of political favours.

The purpose of a politician is to be a leader. A politician has to lead. Otherwise he's just a follower.

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.

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.

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.

It is decidedly not true that "nice guys finish last," as that highly original American baseball philosopher, Leo Durocher, was alleged to have 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.

Diplomacy is really far less important than the stock movements within Russia.

One of the problems with hedge funds is that they are changing so rapidly. If you have the balance sheet that closed business last night, by 11 A.M. this morning, that won't tell you very much about what they're doing.

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.

The person I liked the best was Gerald R. Ford. He was the most decent man in politics I ever had any relationships with.

Since 1948 I have spent every single day thinking how the economic and political worlds have changed.

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.

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.