Alan Greenspan Large Quotations

Large deficits will result in rising interest rates and an ever-growing ratio of debt service to GDP (gross domestic product),

We should not be cutting taxes by borrowing, ... We do not have the capability of having both productive tax cuts and large expenditure increases, and presume that the deficit doesn't matter.

Instead of trying to contain a putative bubble by drastic actions with largely unpredictable consequences, we chose, as we noted in our mid-1999 congressional testimony, to focus on policies to mitigate the fallout when it occurs and, hopefully, ease the transition to the next expansion.

As the value of assets and liabilities have risen relative to income, we have been confronted with the potential for our economies to exhibit larger and perhaps more abrupt responses to changes in factors affecting the balance sheets of households and businesses,

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.

is larger than that of Japan, and may be approaching half the size of the American economy.

The rapid growth and increasing importance of derivative instruments in the risk profile of many large banks has been a particular concern,

Before the crisis broke, there was little reason to question the three decades of phenomenally solid East Asian economic growth, largely financed through the banking system, so long as the rapidly expanding economies and bank credit kept the ratio of non-performing loans to total bank assets low,

will almost surely be reported as one of the largest advances, if not the largest, posted over the past 30 years.

Doubtless, the substantial improvement in the access of business decision makers to real-time information has played a key role, ... Today, businesses have large quantities of data available virtually in real time. As a consequence, they address and resolve economic imbalances far more rapidly than in the past.

Terrorism poses a challenge to the remarkable record of globalization, ... I trust that we will go forward expeditiously with the pending new trade round. The differences to be resolved in such talks are small relative to the larger issue of maintaining our freedoms to travel and trade on a global scale.

One of the major problems with China is that its innovation is largely borrowed technology.

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.

Although we cannot know with certainty until the books are closed, the growth of productivity since 1995 appears to be among the largest in decades,

Nowhere in the world are the synergies of small and large businesses operating side-by-side in a dynamic market economy more apparent than in this country.

...most of the gains in the level and the growth rate of productivity in the United States since 1995 appear to be structural, largely driven by advances in technology and its application -- irreversible in the sense that knowledge once gained is almost never lost,

People don't realize that we cannot forecast the future. What we can do is have probabilities of what causes what, but that's as far as we go. And I've had a very successful career as a forecaster, starting in 1948 forward. The number of mistakes I have made are just awesome. There is no number large enough to account for that.