Alan Greenspan Quotes

To the contrary, when you look at projections, both Polish and international, we can expect some slowing down of the rate of growth in the coming year, 2012. But of course these are projections.

The outlook for the economy, as always, is highly uncertain.

An economist is an expert who will know tomorrow why the things he predicted yesterday didn't happen today.

No one can forecast the economy with certainty.

When you poll all of the economists, uh, across America that I think are intellectually honest they would all, or maybe not all, but 95% of them 96% of them would say you know we really have got a powerful economy.

An economist is an expert who will know tomorrow why the things he predicted yesterday didn't happen.

As chairman of the president’s Council of Economic Advisers during the 1990s, I had to make projections about where the economy was going to be one, two, or three years ahead; frankly, I often found myself facing a cloudy crystal ball. Forecasting a few years out is hard enough; forecasting seventy-five years out is essentially impossible. Slight changes in life expectancy, immigration, wage growth, and interest rates could have large effects on the solvency of the (Social Security System.)

An economist is an expert who will know tomorrow why the outcome he predicted yesterday did not happen today.

If the United States does well [economically], then the whole world does well.

All economic forecasts are subject to considerable uncertainty. There is always a wide range of plausible outcomes for important economic variables, including the federal funds rate.

Economists are about as useful as astrologers in predicting the future (and, like astrologers, they never let failure on one occasion diminish certitude on the next).

I think that in the last eight years, we were averaging economic growth of about 2 percent. It's not good. It's very slow. It's a slow pace. People are expecting that pace to continue if Hillary Clinton becomes president.

I'm an economist, I do a lot of forecasting, and I'm probably one of the most successful forecasters in terms of very specific kinds of forecasts.

If you look at the economy, the U.S. economy, in terms of per-capita terms, in terms of other considerations, has been on the descent, ever since the beginning of the war in Indo-China. And it started really as a result of John F. Kennedy being assassinated.

Any lack of confidence in the economic future or the basic strength of business in the United States is foolish.

Nothing about economic growth in the United States over the course of the past 40, 50 years, during which time this has been continually happening, would indicate that we are being harmed in an overall sense by this.

Experts kill me. Economic experts, that is. Corporations, foundations, publications and governments pay them by the bucketful, and they fill buckets with forecasts that change more frequently than white-collar, workers do shirts. What Lies Ahead is the usual title. What Lies would often be more appropriate. If women's hemlines changed as rapidly as an economist's forecasts, the fashion people and the textile industry would be more profitable than any other. In fact, if all the country's economists were laid end to end, they still wouldn't reach a conclusion.

An economist is someone who knows all the answers to last years' questions.

Mass inflation, welfare line, gross economy, trade it all for what's behind curtain number three.

What's happening right now in the Hip Hop industry is that it is deeply affected by the general economy of America.

There are always going to be some complications.

I know the polling data shows people have a negative view but if you listen to everything out there, you think, my God. We're in such deep trouble. We created more jobs than every other industrial country in the world combined.

I'm a pessimist about probabilities, I'm an optimist about possibilities.

As American productivity, once the exuberant engine of national wealth, has dipped to an embarrassingly uncompetitive low, Americans have shaken their heads: the country's old work ethic is dead.

The optimist regards the future as uncertain.