Alan Greenspan
Alan Greenspan
Alan Greenspanis an American economist who served as Chairman of the Federal Reserve of the United States from 1987 to 2006. He currently works as a private adviser and provides consulting for firms through his company, Greenspan Associates LLC. First appointed Federal Reserve chairman by President Ronald Reagan in August 1987, he was reappointed at successive four-year intervals until retiring on January 31, 2006, after the second-longest tenure in the position...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionEconomist
Date of Birth6 March 1926
CityNew York City, NY
CountryUnited States of America
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.
Much fiscal policy is implemented, not through spending increases, but through tax credits and other so-called tax expenditures. The markets should respond to them as they do spending cuts, with little contraction in economic activity.
I think the whole issue of a debt ceiling makes no sense to me whatsoever. Anybody who is remotely adroit at arithmetic doesn't need a debt ceiling to tell you where you are.
I always believed in animal spirits. It's not their existence that is new. It's the fact that they are not random events, but actually replicate in-bred qualities of human nature which create those animal spirits.
Forecasting our futures is built into our psyches because we will soon have to manage that future. We have no choice. No matter how often we fail, we can never stop trying.
It's only when the markets are perceived to have exhausted themselves on the downside that they turn. Trying to prevent them from going down just merely prolongs the agony.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
We're a democratic society. Shutting down the government should not be on the agenda.
The central focus of what we are doing at the Fed is to keep inflation from accelerating - and preferably decelerating.
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.