Alan Greenspan
Alan Greenspan was born on March 6, 1926, in New York City, a city whose financial institutions would later figure prominently in his career. A citizen of the United States, Greenspan pursued an unusually broad education, studying at the Juilliard School, the George Washington Educational Campus, New York University, the Stern School of Business, and Columbia University. That range of training reflected a range of professional identities: over the course of his life he worked as an economist, a banker, an entrepreneur, a politician, a consultant, and a jazz musician.
His educational path through some of New York's most demanding institutions prepared him for a career that moved across multiple sectors of American economic and public life. Greenspan worked in roles that placed him at the intersection of financial markets and policy, drawing on his training in economics and business to operate across both private and governmental spheres. His work as a consultant and entrepreneur ran alongside his engagement with public institutions, making his career one that resisted easy categorization within a single professional domain.
The honors Greenspan accumulated over his career reflect the international scope of his professional reputation. He received the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Francis Boyer Award, and was named a Fellow of the American Statistical Association. Internationally, he was appointed a Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire and received the Commander of the Legion of Honour. Honorary doctorates were conferred upon him by Hofstra University and the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, and he was recognized as the Financial Times Person of the Year. He also received the Paul A. Volcker Lifetime Achievement Award for Economic Policy.
Throughout his career Greenspan worked in the English language, operating across a set of professional roles — economist, banker, politician, and consultant among them — that together defined his presence in American and international economic affairs. His early training as a jazz musician at the Juilliard School stands as a notable dimension of his formation, one that preceded his long engagement with economics and public finance. The accumulation of awards from institutions in the United States, the United Kingdom, France, and Belgium attests to the international reach of a career that began in New York City in the first decades of the twentieth century.
Quotes by Alan Greenspan
Alan Greenspan's insights on:
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.
Bitcoin is really a fascinating example of how human beings create value, and is not always rational... tt is not a rational currency in that case.
Well, you probably will always believe there should be laws against fraud, and I don’t think there is any need for a law against fraud.
In the nineteenth century, the population multiplied by a factor of almost fifteen, from 5.3 million to 76 million, a total larger than any European country except Russia. By 1890, 80 percent of New York’s citizens were immigrants or the children of immigrants, as were 87 percent of Chicago’s.
Four decades after Thomas Edison’s spectacular illumination of Lower Manhattan in 1882, electricity had done little to make the country’s factories more productive.
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.
Regulation – which is based on force and fear – undermines the moral base of business dealings. It becomes cheaper to bribe a building inspector than to meet his standards of construction. Protection of the consumer by regulation is thus illusory.