Alan Greenspan Quotes
Clearly, sustained low inflation implies less uncertainty about the future, and lower risk premiums imply higher prices of stocks and other earning assets. We can see that in the inverse relationship exhibited by price/earnings ratios and the rate of inflation in the past. But how do we know when irrational exuberance has unduly escalated asset values, which then become subject to unexpected and prolonged contractions …
The phrase “irrational exuberance” has become a catchword for an economic bubble which is in danger of bursting at any moment.
Alan Greenspan, Chairman, Federal Reserve Board, Speech, "The Challenge of Central Banking in a Democratic Society" American Enterprise Institute, December 5, 1996
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It was the souped up nature of the credit default swaps that was in part responsible for the souped up melt down of the economy of 2008 and the great recession thereafter. A credit default swap is an insurance policy that a company will pay off its bonds and not go bankrupt. It is a cross between an insurance mechanism and a stock exchange type security mechanism and through heavy lobbying escaped any kind of regulation. It cost a company no money to write a credit default swap and they were paid to do so. As long as business and the economy was good, it was a terrific business but there was no way of ever knowing how much risk they were taking. So companies who wrote credit default swaps did not have to have the money to pay to back them up if they business was bad. When that happened in 2008 even the largest insurance company in the world collapsed because of the risk of having to pay the credit default swap and the U. S. Government had to take over the insurance company. In 2010, the Obama administration passed a financial reform bill that began to regulate credit default swaps.
This may have been the worst stock market advice ever sent to customers. The Great Depression would suppress the economy of more than a decade.
Jobs led Apple when it became the technology company with the largest stock market valuation ever, yet he freely admitted that he did bit understand the market. He just ran a great company which produced wonderful, innovative products and paid relatively little attention to the stock market and Wall Street.
Alan Greenspan is an American economist who served five terms as the 13th Chair of the Federal Reserve of the United States from 1987 to 2006. He works as a private adviser and provides consulting for firms through his company, Greenspan Associates LLC. First appointed Federal Reserve chairman by President Ronald Reagan in August 1987, he was reappointed at successive four-year intervals until retiring on January 31, 2006, after the second-longest tenure in the position (behind William McChesney Martin).
