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
is on an unsustainable path, in which large deficits result in rising interest rates and ever-growing interest payments that augment deficits in future years.
is larger than that of Japan, and may be approaching half the size of the American economy.
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,
Doubtless, the substantial improvement in the access of business decision makers to real-time information has played a key role, ... Today, businesses have large quantities of data available virtually in real time. As a consequence, they address and resolve economic imbalances far more rapidly than in the past.
...most of the gains in the level and the growth rate of productivity in the United States since 1995 appear to be structural, largely driven by advances in technology and its application -- irreversible in the sense that knowledge once gained is almost never lost,
will almost surely be reported as one of the largest advances, if not the largest, posted over the past 30 years.
If we can maintain an adequate degree of flexibility, some of America 's economic imbalances, most notably the large current account deficit and the housing boom, can be rectified by adjustments in prices, interest rates, and exchange rates rather than through more-wrenching changes in output, incomes, and employment.
People don't realize that we cannot forecast the future. What we can do is have probabilities of what causes what, but that's as far as we go. And I've had a very successful career as a forecaster, starting in 1948 forward. The number of mistakes I have made are just awesome. There is no number large enough to account for that.
We should not be cutting taxes by borrowing, ... We do not have the capability of having both productive tax cuts and large expenditure increases, and presume that the deficit doesn't matter.
One of the major problems with China is that its innovation is largely borrowed technology.
The rapid growth and increasing importance of derivative instruments in the risk profile of many large banks has been a particular concern,
Although we cannot know with certainty until the books are closed, the growth of productivity since 1995 appears to be among the largest in decades,
Nowhere in the world are the synergies of small and large businesses operating side-by-side in a dynamic market economy more apparent than in this country.
Large deficits will result in rising interest rates and an ever-growing ratio of debt service to GDP (gross domestic product),