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 very few times which we have intervened have occurred, ... when we believe the markets are unstable and that intervention might have an impact.
signs of froth in some local markets where home prices seem to have risen to unsustainable levels.
Without the needed restrictions on the size of the GSE balance sheets, we put at risk our ability to preserve safe and sound financial markets in the United States, a key ingredient of support for housing,
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.
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.
Despite the tightest labor markets in a generation, more workers report in a prominent survey that they are fearful of losing their jobs than similar surveys found in 1991 at the bottom of the last recession, ... The marked move of capital from failing to technologies to those at the cutting edge has quickened the pace at which job skills become obsolete.
It is possible to get markets which are too tight, which create inflationary imbalances and ultimately undercut the recovery,
I realize what that does to competitiveness, but that's the way markets work efficiently. In other words, to prevent the exchange rates from moving creates all sorts of distortions.
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,
...In an economy that already has lost some momentum, one must remain alert to the possibility that greater caution and weakening asset values in financial markets could signal or precipitate an excessive softening in household and business spending,
For the moment, the broadly unanticipated behavior of world bond markets remains a conundrum .
The markets are demanding that we change outdated statutory limitations that stand in the way of more efficiently and effectively delivering financial services to the public, ... The Federal Reserve agrees and urges prompt enactment of financial modernization legislation.
We have to do it in a cautious, gradual way. ... (We) should go slowly and test the waters.
The probability of an unwelcome substantial fall in inflation over the next few quarters, though minor, exceeds that of a pickup in inflation.