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
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,
Because it is difficult to suppress growing market exuberance when the economic environment is perceived as more stable, a highly flexible system needs to be in place to rebalance an economy in which psychology and asset prices could change rapidly,
Today, economic value is best symbolized by exceedingly complex, miniaturized integrated circuits and the ideas -- the software -- that utilize them, ... Most of what we currently perceive as value and wealth is intellectual and impalpable.
What they perceive as newly abundant liquidity can readily disappear,
We have obviously specified implicitly that we prefer to act within our scheduled meetings, ... But we have also shown over the years that when we perceive that actions are required between meetings we have never hesitated to move.
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.
difficult to suppress growing market exuberance when the economic environment is perceived as more stable.
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 have greatly benefited from his perspective and keen insights.