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 gut-feel of the 55-year old trader is more important than the mathematical elegance of the 25-year old genius.
It's hard to overemphasize how important Ford's deregulation was. True, most of the benefits took years to unfold-rail freight rates, for example hardly budged at first. Yet deregulation set the stage for an enormous wave of creative destruction in the 1980s:...
A decline in the national housing price level would need to be substantial to trigger a significant rise in foreclosures, because the vast majority of homeowners have built up substantial equity in their homes despite large mortgage-market financed withdrawals of home equity in recent years.
Even though some down payments are borrowed, it would take a large, and historically most unusual, fall in home prices to wipe out a significant part of home equity. Many of those who purchased their residence more than a year ago have equity buffers in their homes adequate to withstand any price decline other than a very deep one.
We cannot rule out a situation in which a preemptive policy tightening becomes necessary, ... Such caution seems especially warranted with regard to the sharp rise in equity prices during the past two years. These gains have obviously raised questions of sustainability.
What we have found over the years in the marketplace is that derivatives have been an extraordinarily useful vehicle to transfer risk from those who shouldn't be taking it to those who are willing to and are capable of doing so.
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, recognizing the powerful forces of productivity growth and global restraint on inflation, have not perceived to date the need to tighten policy,
We at the Federal Reserve have greatly benefited from his perspective and keen insights.