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
Fear invariably and universally induces disengagement, and disengagement is negative division of labor.
Unless you are willing to compromise, society cannot live together.
Markets do very weird things because it reacts to how people behave, and sometimes people are a little screwy.
Fear is a far more dominant force in human behaviour than euphoria - I would never have expected that or given it a moment's thought before, but it shows up in the data in so many ways.
What a sound money system does is to stabilize all the elements in it, and reduces the uncertainty that people confront. And the one thing all human beings do when they are confronted with uncertainty is pull back, withdraw, disengage, and that means economic activity, which is really dealing with people, just goes straight down.
Europe is very critical to the United States in the sense not only do we have a fourth of our exports there, but more importantly, a significant proportion of the foreign affiliate profits in fact, half of U.S. corporations, are in Europe.
At the outset of the creation of the euro in 1999, it was expected that the southern eurozone economies would behave like those in the north; the Italians would behave like Germans. They didn't. Instead, northern Europe fell into subsidizing southern Europe's excess consumption, that is, its current account deficits.
Finance is wholly different from the rest the economy.
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.
We really can't forecast all that well, and yet we pretend that we can, but we really can't.
The ratio of the number of workers contributing to social security to the number of beneficiaries has declined to the point where maintaining the annuity value of benefits on retirement at a level well in excess of accumulated contributions has become extremely unlikely.
The rates of return on investment in the same new technologies are correspondingly less in Europe and Japan because businesses there face higher costs of displacing workers than we do, ... Moreover, because our costs of dismissing workers are lower, the potential costs of hiring and the risks associated with expanding employment are less.
The rate of growth of productivity cannot increase indefinitely, ... While there appears to be considerable expectation in the business community, and possibly Wall Street, that the productivity acceleration has not yet peaked, experience advises caution.
The rapid growth and increasing importance of derivative instruments in the risk profile of many large banks has been a particular concern,