Alan Greenspan Quotes

“Amateurs want to be right. Professionals want to make money.”

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

“Excessive optimism sows the seeds of its own reversal.”

“Gold still represents the ultimate form of payment in the world. Fiat money in extremis is accepted by nobody. Gold is always accepted.”

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

“How do we know when irrational exuberance has unduly escalated asset values?”

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

“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.”

“I know that you believe you understand what you think I said, but I'm not sure you realize that what you heard is not 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.”

“I made a mistake in presuming that the self-interests of organisations, specifically banks and others, were such that they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders and their equity in the firms.”

“If all currencies are moving up or down together, the question is: relative to what?

Gold is the canary in the coal mine. It signals problems with respect to currency markets. Central banks should pay attention to it.”

“If I seem unduly clear to you, you must have misunderstood what I said.”

“If I've made myself clear, I've misspoken.”

“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 do not realize in [the U.S], for example, how tenuous our ties to international energy are. That is, we on a daily basis require continuous flow.

If that flow is shut off, it causes catastrophic effects in the industrial world. And it's that which made [Saddam Hussein] far more important to get out than bin Laden.
”

“Remember what we're looking at. Gold is a currency. It is still, by all evidence, a premier currency, that no fiat currency, including the dollar, can match.”

“Rules cannot take the place of character.”

“Since I've become a central banker, I've learned to mumble with great incoherence. If I seem unduly clear to you, you must have misunderstood what I said.”

“The abandonment of the gold standard made it possible for the welfare statists to use the banking system as a means to an unlimited expansion of credit. 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.

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. If one grasps this, one has no difficulty in understanding the statists' antagonism toward the gold standard.”

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

“The more flexible an economy, the greater its ability to self-correct in response to inevitable, often unanticipated, disturbances and thus to contain the size and consequences of cyclical imbalances.”

“The number one problem in today's generation and economy is the lack of financial literacy.”

“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.”

“Under the gold standard, a free banking system stands as the protector of an economy's stability and balanced growth.

The abandonment of the gold standard made it possible for the welfare statists to use the banking system as a means to an unlimited expansion of credit.

In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation”

“We can guarantee cash benefits as far out and at whatever size you like, but we cannot guarantee their purchasing power.”

“We had a bubble in housing.”

“You can't have the capitalist system if an increasing number of people think it is unjust.”

“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.”