Alan Greenspan Quotes on Past (15 Quotes)

We cannot rule out a situation in which a preemptive policy tightening becomes necessary, ... Such caution seems especially warranted with regard to the sharp rise in equity prices during the past two years. These gains have obviously raised questions of sustainability.

as many uncertainties over the next 18 years as it has over the past 18.

The growing stability of the world economy over the past decade may have encouraged investors to accept increasingly lower levels of compensation for risk.

Many homeowners might have saved tens of thousands of dollars had they held adjustable-rate mortgages rather than fixed-rate mortgages during the past decade.

will almost surely be reported as one of the largest advances, if not the largest, posted over the past 30 years.

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.

Hopefully his successor, whoever it is, will demonstrate that the good policy we've had over the past 18 years is as much due to the evolution of the institution as it is to Greenspan per se.

... the flexibility of our market-driven economy has allowed us, thus far, to weather reasonably well the steep rise in spot and futures prices for crude oil and natural gas that we have experienced over the past two years,

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,

The Federal Reserve has responded to the balance of market forces by gradually raising the federal funds rate over the past year, ... Certainly, to have done otherwise -- to have held the federal funds rate at last year's level even as credit demands and market interest rates rose -- would have required an inappropriately inflationary expansion of liquidity.

Because there was little retrenchment during the cyclical downturn, the potential for a significant acceleration in activity in the household sector is likely to be more limited than in past business cycles,

The changes in the budget outlook over the past several years are truly remarkable, ... We need to resist those policies that could readily resurrect the deficits of the past and the fiscal imbalances that followed in their wake.

Although the business cycle has not disappeared, flexibility has made the economy more resilient to shocks and more stable overall during the past couple of decades,

Over most of the past several years, the behavior of unit labor costs has been quite subdued, ... But those costs have turned up of late, and whether the favorable trends of the past few years will be maintained is unclear.

Over the past decade, the U.S. economy has benefited from a remarkable acceleration of productivity. But experience suggests that such rapid advances are unlikely to be maintained in an economy that has reached the cutting edge of technology.