Quotes from Alan Greenspan

Increased jobs are the consequence of increased trade. Increasing jobs more than output implies a fall in productivity and standards of living. That surely cannot be our goal.

The problem is you cannot have free global trade with highly restrictive, regulated domestic markets.

Unless you are willing to compromise, society cannot live together.

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

...our market system depends critically on trust-trust in the word of our colleagues and trust in the word of those with whom we do business.

I wasn't able to do much reading when I was chairman of the Reserve Board. The workload was too large, and the luxury of reading was not available to me. So I caught up a good deal when I left office.

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.

The central focus of what we are doing at the Fed is to keep inflation from accelerating - and preferably decelerating.

One of the major problems with China is that its innovation is largely borrowed technology.

I love to play tennis and golf, listen to music, watch baseball and root for the Redskins.

I love facts and figures. It's like following a detective story, piecing together what's going on in the economy.

I'm a free-market economist from years and years back, and I've never veered from that.

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.

What I see in the corporate sector is very clearly an issue of a major shortfall in the issue of, what some people call confidence, but whatever you want to call it. Clearly people are looking out in the very distant future and they are saying that it is too complex.

If somebody had said to me in June or July of 1987, 'We'd like you to become chairman of the Federal Reserve, but you're never allowed to discuss any economics after you leave,' I'd have said, 'Forget it.' What do they want me to do? Become an anthropologist?'

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.

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.

If I turn out to be particularly clear, you've probably misunderstood what I've said.

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.

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. So I made an economic decision, and it turned out the best judgment I ever made in my life.

I was sort of shocked when it all of a sudden turned out that I got all A's through college, with the exception of two B's in the first term. I never envisaged myself as summa cum laude.

I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.

The Iraq War is largely about oil.

At the outset of the creation of the euro in 1999, it was expected that the southern eurozone economies would behave like those in the north; the Italians would behave like Germans. They didn't. Instead, northern Europe fell into subsidizing southern Europe's excess consumption, that is, its current account deficits.