589 Quotes by Alan Greenspan

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.

What we have found over the years in the marketplace is that derivatives have been an extraordinarily useful vehicle to transfer risk from those who shouldn’t be taking it to those who are willing to and are capable of doing so.

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.

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

If I’ve made myself clear, I’ve misspoken.

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.

It’s hard to overemphasize how important Ford’s deregulation was. True, most of the benefits took years to unfold-rail freight rates, for example hardly budged at first. Yet deregulation set the stage for an enormous wave of creative destruction in the 1980s:...

If prices go down, we will have problems – problems in the sense of spillover to other areas, Greenspan said. While he hasn’t seen such spreading yet, I expect to.

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