Zitat des Tages von Alan Greenspan:
I guess I should warn you, if I turn out to be particularly clear, you've probably misunderstood what I've said.
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.
We really can't forecast all that well, and yet we pretend that we can, but we really can't.
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.
Whatever you tax, you get less of.
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.
The purpose of a politician is to be a leader. A politician has to lead. Otherwise he's just a follower.
Crony capitalism is essentially a condition in which... public officials are giving favours to people in the private sector in payment of political favours.
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.
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.
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.
The culture of Greece is not the same as the culture of Germany, and to fuse them into a single unit is extremely difficult.
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.
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.
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.
Anything that we can do to raise personal savings is very much in the interest of this country.
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.
Protectionism will do little to create jobs and if foreigners retaliate, we will surely lose jobs.
Revolutions are something you see only in retrospect.
History has not dealt kindly with the aftermath of protracted periods of low risk premiums.
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.
Any informed borrower is simply less vulnerable to fraud and abuse.
I've been around long enough to know that a good deal of the praise heaped on me I had nothing to do with. The only thing I did object to was the fact that where the criticism was actually wrong. Did it bother me? Of course it bothered me. But I've been around long enough to have ups and downs. So you get over it.
We're a democratic society. Shutting down the government should not be on the agenda.
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?'
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 United States can pay any debt it has because we can always print money to do that. So there is zero probability of default.
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.
Diplomacy is really far less important than the stock movements within Russia.
The problem is you cannot have free global trade with highly restrictive, regulated domestic markets.
I'm a free-market economist from years and years back, and I've never veered from that.
It is very difficult to predict when a bond crisis could happen.