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 physical assets of such a firm comprise a small proportion of its asset base, ... Trust and reputation can vanish overnight. A factory cannot.
What is not clear is whether the market values that are being placed on particular assets involved in this technology revolution are appropriately priced.
This situation suggests that international investors will eventually adjust their accumulation of dollar assets or, alternatively, seek higher dollar returns to offset concentration risk, elevating the cost of financing of the U.S. current account deficit and rendering it increasingly less tenable,
As the value of assets and liabilities have risen relative to income, we have been confronted with the potential for our economies to exhibit larger and perhaps more abrupt responses to changes in factors affecting the balance sheets of households and businesses,
How do we know when irrational exuberance has unduly escalated asset values?
Before the crisis broke, there was little reason to question the three decades of phenomenally solid East Asian economic growth, largely financed through the banking system, so long as the rapidly expanding economies and bank credit kept the ratio of non-performing loans to total bank assets low,
investing Social Security trust fund assets in equities compromises the efficient allocation of our capital -- which?is so essential to raising our standards of living.
Investing a portion of the Social Security trust fund assets in equities as the administration and others have proposed would arguably put at risk the efficiency of our capital markets and, thus, our economy,
we have seen how lax standards, excesses, or fraud can cause disproportionate losses to insurance funds.
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,