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. – Alan Greenspan
Anything that we can do to raise personal savings is very much in the interest of this country. – Alan Greenspan
We’re a democratic society. Shutting down the government should not be on the agenda. – Alan Greenspan
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. – Alan Greenspan
The problem is you cannot have free global trade with highly restrictive, regulated domestic markets. – Alan Greenspan
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. – Alan Greenspan
The central focus of what we are doing at the Fed is to keep inflation from accelerating – and preferably decelerating. – Alan Greenspan
There is a huge number of people outside our borders who would love to come here. In fact, many of them come here, get well educated, and then are required to leave… This is a factor in income inequality. – Alan Greenspan
You have to really stretch your imagination to infer what the intrinsic value of Bitcoin is. I haven’t been able to do it. Maybe somebody else can. – Alan Greenspan
Putin probably, almost certainly, thinks that one of the great disasters of the 20th century was the demise of the Soviet Union. It’s very obvious that he’s trying to work its way back and maintain something similar to that sort of institution. – Alan Greenspan
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. – Alan Greenspan
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. – Alan Greenspan
Crony capitalism is essentially a condition in which… public officials are giving favours to people in the private sector in payment of political favours. – Alan Greenspan
Most high-income people in our country do not realize that their incomes are being subsidized by their protection from competition from highly skilled people who are prevented from immigrating to the United States. But we need such skills in order to staff our productive economy, so that the standard of living for Americans as a whole can grow. – Alan Greenspan
The culture of Greece is not the same as the culture of Germany, and to fuse them into a single unit is extremely difficult. – Alan Greenspan
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. – Alan Greenspan
The only way you get economic progress, real standards of living moving higher, is to have the savings of the society continuously invested in the cutting-edge technologies. And those technologies which are obsolescent get dropped out. – Alan Greenspan
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. – Alan Greenspan
I was a good amateur but only an average professional. I soon realized that there was a limit to how far I could rise in the music business, so I left the band and enrolled at New York University. – Alan Greenspan
I guess I should warn you, if I turn out to be particularly clear, you’ve probably misunderstood what I’ve said. – 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. – Alan Greenspan
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. – Alan Greenspan
I’m a free-market economist from years and years back, and I’ve never veered from that. – Alan Greenspan
We really can’t forecast all that well, and yet we pretend that we can, but we really can’t. – Alan Greenspan
