Alan Greenspan Quotes

We've suffered a 'Ponzification' of the economy in recent years, as bubbles have built up and then burst, and each time we act as though it's the first time.

Everyone would like the world always to be in bubble times. But that doesn't happen.

We are in a big, fat, ugly bubble. And we better be awfully careful.

Throughout the '90s and early 2000s, our financial industry and governments leaned on a snake-oil mirage of wealth creation, a bubble predicated on the obvious falsehood that things could only get better.

Presidential money is almost like the housing bubble. It's growing at such an astronomical rate, you think it can't get any bigger.

Investors are impatient and they are also desperate for the 'next big thing,' and they are not paying attention to the fact that the 'next big thing' can be an economic crisis that they have created by being very irresponsible with their power.

When the economy is bad, the economy is the only issue.

We do not live in an economy, we live in a Ponzi scheme.

If you go into what I call a bubble boom, every bubble bursts.

Double, treble, quadruple bubble, watch the stock market get into trouble.

In several quarters in the 2000s, if you added up all the private savings of everyone in the United States, it was less than nothing. You can't sustain that as a driver of growth.

The way you create deflation is you create an asset bubble.

A United States collapse would be much different than a Greece collapse. Greece can collapse, and there's a ripple. We collapse, and the world feels it.

The rise in the price of gold is a sign that capitalism has stumbled.

It's not that we can predict bubbles - if we could, we would be rich. But we can certainly have a bubble warning system.

Some things never change - there will be another crisis, and its impact will be felt by the financial markets.

In Western capitalism circa 2013, fear that the market economy has become dysfunctional is not limited to a few entrepreneurs in Boulder. It is being publicly expressed, with increasing frequency, by some of the people who occupy the commanding heights of the global economy.

At some point, there will be some other financial crisis. It's in the nature of a capitalist system.

We spend too much, we borrow too much, and we distort the markets. The bigger the distortions have lasted, the bigger the bust will be.

I experienced the year 2000 dot com crash and the 2008 financial crisis, and it almost wiped out the company.

What most entrepreneurs don't understand is that it isn't the economy that bursts a bubble, but investor psychology.

I worked on one speech about the financial system that caused the Dow to drop, like, 200 points.

I think it's been, you know, kind of like a tragic play to this point. But at this point, I think it's clear, and will be clear to the majority of the Congress. I think it's clear to the American people that there is only one countervailing force to a world where financial institutions are trying to sell instruments every day and where credit has dried up, and that's the United States Treasury.

Speculation in land may be necessary to capitalism, but speculative orgies periodically become a quagmire of destruction for capital itself.

All the risky things that were happening back in ’06 and ‘07 are back again to the same level, if not more. So we are in the beginning of a credit bubble, but just the beginning.