Alan Greenspan Business Quotations

To succeed, you will soon learn, as I did, the importance of a solid foundation in the basics of education - literacy, both verbal and numerical, and communication skills.

Any informed borrower is simply less vulnerable to fraud and abuse.

I have found no greater satisfaction than achieving success through honest dealing and strict adherence to the view that, for you to gain, those you deal with should gain as well.

One of the problems with hedge funds is that they are changing so rapidly. If you have the balance sheet that closed business last night, by 11 A.M. this morning, that won't tell you very much about what they're doing.

I was a good amateur but only an average professional. I soon realized that there was a limit to how far I could rise in the music business, so I left the band and enrolled at New York University.

The only thing that was economic, I might say, about my music career, aside from the fact that I did everybody's tax returns in the band, was the decision I made to leave the music business on economic grounds.

Until we experience an economic slowdown, we will not know for sure how much of the extraordinary rise in output per hour in the past five years is attributable to the irreversible way value is created and how much reflects endeavors on the part of the business community to stretch existing capital and labor resources in ways that are not sustainable over the long run,

It is decidedly not true that "nice guys finish last," as that highly original American baseball philosopher, Leo Durocher, was alleged to have said.

It seems superfluous to constrain trading in some of the newer derivatives and other innovative financial contracts of the past decade. The worst have failed; investors no longer fund them and are not likely to in the future.

...our market system depends critically on trust-trust in the word of our colleagues and trust in the word of those with whom we do business.

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.

Lower equity prices and higher financing costs should damp household and business spending, and greater uncertainty and risk aversion may also lead to more cautious spending behavior,

new innovations have begun to alter the manner in which we do business and create value, often in ways not readily foreseeable even five years ago.

It is becoming increasingly difficult to deny that something profoundly different than the postwar business cycle has emerged in recent years,

The rate of growth of productivity cannot increase indefinitely, ... While there appears to be considerable expectation in the business community, and possibly Wall Street, that the productivity acceleration has not yet peaked, experience advises caution.

With price inflation already at a low level, substantial further disinflation would be an unwelcome development, especially to the extent it put pressure on profit margins and impeded the revival of business spending,

Firms still appear hesitant to spend and hire, and we need to remain mindful of the possibility that lingering business caution could be an impediment to improved economic performance,

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.

Despite the disruptions engendered by the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, the typical dynamics of the business cycle have reemerged and are prompting a firming in economic activity,

Although the business cycle has not disappeared, flexibility has made the economy more resilient to shocks and more stable overall during the past couple of decades,

The U.S. economy appears to have withstood a set of blows -- major declines in equity markets, a sharp retrenchment in investment spending, and the tragic terrorist attacks of last September -- that in previous business cycles almost surely would have induced a severe contraction,

On balance, the recovery in spending on business fixed investment is likely to be only gradual; in particular, its growth will doubtless be less frenetic than in 1999 and early 2000,

Indeed, our goal, in responding to the complexity of current economic forces, is to extend the expansion by containing imbalances and avoiding the very recession that would complete a business cycle,

...In an economy that already has lost some momentum, one must remain alert to the possibility that greater caution and weakening asset values in financial markets could signal or precipitate an excessive softening in household and business spending,

Because there was little retrenchment during the cyclical downturn, the potential for a significant acceleration in activity in the household sector is likely to be more limited than in past business cycles,

an array of influences unique to this business cycle, however, seems likely to moderate the speed of the anticipated recovery.