Alan Greenspan Quotes

Institutions like mutual funds often worry that if they disclose their plans to buy a stock, copycats will move quickly and drive up the stock before the purchase is completed.

On a given day, you can have market fluctuations where prices fluctuate far more than the underlying economic value of the unit.

Markets are self-regulating only because some brave investors are prepared to bet against the market trend.

In a sense, the market, by expecting a fall in prices, discounts that fall and makes it happen right away instead of later. Expectations speed up future price reactions.

Speculative markets have always been vulnerable to illusion. But seeing the folly in markets provides no clear advantage in forecasting outcomes, because changes in the force of the illusion are difficult to predict.

I've explained before the power psychology has on the markets.

In fact, of all hoodoos in Wall Street I think the resolve to induce the stock market to act as a fairy godmother is the busiest and most persistent.

Greenspan's eventual explanation for the growing gap between stock prices and actual productivity was that, fortuitously, the laws of nature had changed -- humanity had reached a happy stage of history where bullshit could be used as rocket fuel.

In other words, the market is not a weighing machine, on which the value of each issue is recorded by an exact and impersonal mechanism, in accordance with its specific qualities. Rather should we say that the market is a voting machine, whereon countless individuals register choices which are the product partly of reason and partly of emotion.

It may be that the U.S. stock market starts to rise if people think it's gone far enough.

Interest is the barometer of the state.

The Stock Exchange is something very different. There is no economy and no production of goods and services. There are only fantasies in which people from one hour to the next decide that this or that company is worth so many billions, more or less. It doesn't have a thing to do with reality or with the Swedish economy.

I don't fully understand movements in the gold price.

Stocks are the only thing that people are happy to buy when the price goes up.

The effects of Twitter and Facebook and all those things on people's psychologies is a really interesting question to which nobody knows the answer.

Gold is a way of going long on fear, and it has been a pretty good way of going long on fear from time to time. But you really have to hope people become more afraid in a year or two years than they are now. And if they become more afraid you make money, if they become less afraid you lose money, but the gold itself doesn’t produce anything.

Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.

I've noticed that nowadays I'm doing a lot of stuff on the phone and on the computer, which I usually wouldn't do earlier. And I can feel my brain being rewired: I'm getting anxious, I'm getting more manic. Now, I'm an extreme case because I'm old and I'm overdoing it. But still, it's really interesting that I can actually feel a change in my neurochemistry from this interaction with the technology.

Speculative stock movements are carried too far in both directions, frequently in the general market and at all times in at least some of the individual issues.

Be fearful when there is greed and be greedy when there is fear.

The most common cause of low prices is pessimism - some times pervasive, some times specific to a company or industry. We want to do business in such an environment, not because we like pessimism but because we like the prices it produces. It's optimism that is the enemy of the rational buyer.

That was how a Salomon bond trader thought: He forgot whatever it was that he wanted to do for a minute and put his finger on the pulse of the market. If the market felt fidgety, if people were scared or desperate, he herded them like sheep into a corner, then made them pay for their uncertainty. He sat on the market until it puked gold coins. Then he worried about what he wanted to do.

Always remember that market quotations are there for convenience, either to be taken advantage of or to be ignored.

There is a culture among academics to be obscure. If you're too clear, you can't be saying anything interesting. The issue isn't word length. The issue is a commitment to speaking in a way an audience can understand.

A free-enterprise economy depends only on markets, and according to the most advanced mathematical macroeconomic theory, markets depend only on moods: specifically, the mood of the men in the pinstripes, also known as the Boys on the Street. When the Boys are in a good mood, the market thrives; when they get scared or sullen, it is time for each one of us to look into the retail apple business.