Alan Greenspan Economic Quotations

The only way you get economic progress, real standards of living moving higher, is to have the savings of the society continuously invested in the cutting-edge technologies. And those technologies which are obsolescent get dropped out.

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.

Since 1948 I have spent every single day thinking how the economic and political worlds have changed.

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,

Until market forces, assisted by a vigilant Federal Reserve, affect the necessary alignment of aggregate demand with the growth of potential aggregate supply, the full benefits of innovative productivity acceleration are at risk of being undermined by financial and economic instability,

Whether those adjustments are wrenching will depend ... on the degree of economic flexibility that we and our trading partners maintain, and I hope enhance, in the years ahead,

Unless the situation is reversed, at some point these budget trends will cause serious economic disruptions,

Throughout all this history, the CEA has, in most cases, provided the president with the best economic advice available at the time and has, crucially, been a consistent advocate for the importance of market forces,

All taxes are a drag on economic growth. It's only a question of degree.

We need ... to be aware that our front-loaded policy actions this year, coupled with the tax cuts under way, should be increasingly affecting economic activity as the year progresses,

Six weeks after the beginning of the war, we have only limited readings on broader economic conditions, and that information has been mixed,

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.

I am concerned about the recent evident weakening of support for free trade, ... Should we endeavor to freeze competitive progress in place, we will almost certainly slow economic growth overall.

Further development of China's trading relationships with the United States and other industrial countries will work to strengthen the rule of law within China and to firm its commitment to economic reform,

Today, economic value is best symbolized by exceedingly complex, miniaturized integrated circuits and the ideas -- the software -- that utilize them, ... Most of what we currently perceive as value and wealth is intellectual and impalpable.

reductions in demand for our exports and intensified competition from imports. All of this suggests that the growth of economic activity in this country will moderate from the recent brisk pace.

Looking ahead, the consensus expectation for a pickup in economic activity is not unreasonable, though the timing and extent of that improvement continue to be uncertain,

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,

Thus our baseline outlook for the U.S. economy is one of sustained economic growth and contained inflation pressures. In our view, realizing this outcome will require the Federal Reserve to continue to remove monetary accommodation.

The demand for new computer applications will no doubt continue to spur demand for those with the creativity and the higher-level conceptual skills that will enable us to increasingly harness technology to produce greater economic value,

We ought to be more concerned with the emergence of inflation than with temporary economic weakness.

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,

While this stellar non-inflationary economic expansion still appears remarkably stress-free on the surface, there are developing imbalances that give us pause,

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,

difficult to suppress growing market exuberance when the economic environment is perceived as more stable.

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.

Faster economic growth, doubtless, would make deficits far easier to contain. But faster economic growth alone is not likely to be the full solution to currently projected long-term deficits.

The United States is currently in its ninth year of economic expansion, an exemplary accomplishment by any standard. Growth of output has remained vigorous, unemployment is lower than it has been in nearly thirty years, and yet, despite the tautness in labor markets, there have been no obvious signs of emerging inflation pressures,

These changes, assisted by improved prices in asset markets, have left households and businesses better positioned than they were earlier to boost outlays as their wariness about the economic environment abates,

Our analysis of economic developments almost surely will need to deal in greater detail with balance sheet considerations than was the case in the earlier decades of the postwar period,

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.

Despite the disruptions of Hurricanes Katrina, Rita and Wilma, economic activity appears to be expanding at a reasonably good pace as we head into 2006.

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,

Any notable shortfall in economic performance from the exemplary standard of recent years runs the risk of reviving mistrust of market-oriented systems, even among conventional policy makers,

As China's citizens experience economic gains, so will the American firms that trade in their expanding markets,

Although the global economic expansion appears to have been on a reasonably firm path through the summer months, the recent surge in energy prices will undoubtedly be a drag from now on.

This period of sub-par economic growth is not yet over, and we are not free of the risk that economic weakness will be greater than currently anticipated, requiring further policy response,

Economic policymakers face enormous uncertainty. Economic models provide a set of useful tools to frame future outcomes, but as we were reminded repeatedly during our efforts to forecast the economy in 1974 and 1975, models can go off track in myriad ways, ... Objective and thorough analysis ... is the most effective counterweight to this challenge.

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,

If no action is taken at all ... we're going to be confronted within a few years with a marked upward ratcheting of long-term interest rates, which is very debilitating to long-term economic growth,

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.

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,

The influence of capital gains on economic behavior ... is likely to be of substantial consequence for the prospective performance of the economy,

The impressive performance of the U.S. economy over the past couple of decades, despite shocks that in the past would have produced marked economic contractions, offers the clearest evidence of the benefits of increased market flexibility,

The economic fundamentals remain firm, and the U.S. economy appears to retain important forward momentum,

The effects of the present merger wave are yet to be determined, ... But, unless a relationship between bigness and market concentration can be more firmly rooted in anti-competitive behavior, bigness, per se, does not appear to be an issue for national economic policy.

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.

The current surge in oil prices, though noticeable, is likely to prove significantly less consequential to economic growth and inflation than the surge in the 1970s,

The current economic performance, with its combination of strong growth and low inflation, is as impressive as any I have witnessed in my near half-century of daily observation of the American economy,

The determination of global economic activity in recent years has been influenced importantly by capital gains on various types of assets, and the liabilities that finance them. Our forecasts and hence policy are becoming increasingly driven by asset price changes.