Alan Greenspan Ability Quotations

History cannot be reduced to a set of statistics and probabilities.

When trust is lost, a nation's ability to transact business is palpably undermined.

At present, the Social Security trustees estimate that the unfunded liability over the indefinite future to be $10.4 trillion, ... The shortfall in Medicare is calculated at several multiples of the one in Social Security.

Before the recovery process gets under way, stability will need to be restored to the American economy and to others around the world,

Without the needed restrictions on the size of the GSE balance sheets, we put at risk our ability to preserve safe and sound financial markets in the United States, a key ingredient of support for housing,

The more flexible an economy, the greater its ability to self-correct after inevitable, often unanticipated disturbances, ... The impressive performance of the U.S. economy over the past couple of decades, despite shocks that in the past would have surely produced marked economic contraction, offers the clearest evidence of the benefits of increased market flexibility.

Notwithstanding the demonstrable advantages of the new international financial system, the Mexican financial breakdown in late 1994 and, of course, the most recent episodes in East Asia and elsewhere, have raised questions about the inherent stability of this new system,

I do think that we have to bring the existing instability to a level of stability reasonably shortly to prevent the contagion from really spilling over and creating some very significant kinds of problems for all of us.

The growing stability of the world economy over the past decade may have encouraged investors to accept increasingly lower levels of compensation for risk.

The capacity of workers, after being displaced, to find a new job that will eventually provide nearly comparable pay most often depends on the general knowledge of the worker and the ability of that individual to learn new skills,

the need to expand our nation's ability to import natural gas.

That greater tendency toward self-correction has made the cyclical stability of the economy less dependent on the actions of macroeconomic policy makers, whose responses often have come too late or have been misguided.

The economic and financial world is changing in ways that we still do not fully comprehend, ... Policymakers accordingly cannot always count on an ability to anticipate potentially adverse developments sufficiently in advance to effectively address them.

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.