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
profound implications for the free world's trading system and the long-term growth potential of the American economy.
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,
The system worked. Moreover, following September 11, 2001, we found that the Y2K preparations and fixes had far-greater reach than we had realized,
The system was holding up ... the American economy kept getting battered and battered and battered and it was still standing and indeed, as of Sept. 10, it was still standing,
could prove destabilizing to our financial system as a whole and in the end could seriously diminish the availability of home mortgage funds.
While the adjustments may be difficult for a time, these crises will pass. Stronger individual economies and a more robust and efficient international economic and financial system will surely emerge in their wake,
I have little doubt that my successors, and theirs, will continue to sustain the leadership of the American financial system in an ever-widening global economy,
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.
What a sound money system does is to stabilize all the elements in it, and reduces the uncertainty that people confront. And the one thing all human beings do when they are confronted with uncertainty is pull back, withdraw, disengage, and that means economic activity, which is really dealing with people, just goes straight down.
In an environment of weak financial systems, lax supervisory regimes, and vague assurances about depositor or creditor protections, the state of confidence so necessary to the functioning of any banking system was torn asunder.
If we are to remain preeminent in transforming knowledge into economic value, ... America's system of higher education must remain the world's leader in generating scientific and technological breakthroughs and in meeting the challenge to educate workers.
Because the pay-as-you-go system will be very difficult to manage, we need an alternative,
The complexity of our economy is such, and the way liquidity flows through the system is such, that you essentially get very complex differences in the way monetary policy plays out, ... But, at the end of the day, it does seem to be effective.
We have to do it in a cautious, gradual way. ... (We) should go slowly and test the waters.