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
If somebody had said to me in June or July of 1987, 'We'd like you to become chairman of the Federal Reserve, but you're never allowed to discuss any economics after you leave,' I'd have said, 'Forget it.' What do they want me to do? Become an anthropologist?'
Should globalization be allowed to proceed and thereby create an ever more flexible international financial system, history suggests that current imbalances will be defused with little disruption,
As I have said previously to this committee, because of the nature of the type of acceleration in productivity and dynamic change that is occurring in the American economy, my first priority would be to allow as much of the surplus to flow through into a reduction in debt to the public,
... the flexibility of our market-driven economy has allowed us, thus far, to weather reasonably well the steep rise in spot and futures prices for crude oil and natural gas that we have experienced over the past two years,
we have seen how lax standards, excesses, or fraud can cause disproportionate losses to insurance funds.
The physical assets of such a firm comprise a small proportion of its asset base, ... Trust and reputation can vanish overnight. A factory cannot.
There have been signs recently that some of the forces that have been restraining the economy over the past year are starting to diminish and that activity is beginning to firm,
We think that coming up on a regular scheduled basis ... has been very productive, ... It requires us ... to have a structure of policy that is coherent to the Congress.
We've come a long way through this adjustment process and we're still standing and that's good news, ... is still not doing well but (is) far better given what has happened than I would have forecast six, eight, nine months ago.
We are seeing the first signs of erosion at the edges, especially in manufacturing. That's a signal that the effects of East Asia and Russia on our financial system are increasingly a factor.
We at the Federal Reserve, recognizing the powerful forces of productivity growth and global restraint on inflation, have not perceived to date the need to tighten policy,
We at the Federal Reserve have greatly benefited from his perspective and keen insights.
weathered reasonably well the steep rise in spot and futures prices for oil and natural gas.
With production running well below sales, the lift to income and spending from the inevitable cessation of inventory liquidation could be significant,