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.
Fixed mortgage rates remain at historically low levels and thus should continue to fuel reasonably strong housing demand and, through equity extraction, to support consumer spending as well,
To date, interest-sensitive spending has remained robust and the FOMC (Federal Open Market Committee) will have to stay alert for signs that real interest rates have not yet risen enough to bring the growth of demand into line with that of potential supply, even should the acceleration in productivity continue,
fully appreciate the risk that some households may have trouble meeting monthly payments as interest rates and the macroeconomic climate change.
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.
There are powerful reasons to suspect that the elimination of the double taxation of dividends and cuts in marginal tax rates will elevate long-term productivity, ... If, however, in the process we get a significant increase in deficits, which induce a rise in long-term interest rates, that will be a significant undercutting of the benefits achieved by tax cuts.
The rates of return on investment in the same new technologies are correspondingly less in Europe and Japan because businesses there face higher costs of displacing workers than we do, ... Moreover, because our costs of dismissing workers are lower, the potential costs of hiring and the risks associated with expanding employment are less.
Large deficits will result in rising interest rates and an ever-growing ratio of debt service to GDP (gross domestic product),
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.
The Federal Reserve has responded to the balance of market forces by gradually raising the federal funds rate over the past year, ... Certainly, to have done otherwise -- to have held the federal funds rate at last year's level even as credit demands and market interest rates rose -- would have required an inappropriately inflationary expansion of liquidity.
I haven't stipulated increased rates of return are a significant issue in this debate.
I don't think we did pop the bubble. We did raise interest rates in 1999, and the reason we did that is that real long-term rates were beginning to rise because the economy was beginning to accelerate,
Indications that the extent of the application of existing technology is still far from complete, plus potential benefits derived from continuing synergies, support a distinct possibility that total productivity growth rates will remain high or even increase further,
We have to do it in a cautious, gradual way. ... (We) should go slowly and test the waters.