This decade is strewn with examples of bright people who thought they built a better mousetrap that could consistently extract abnormal returns from the financial markets. Some succeed for a time. But while there may occasionally be mis-configurations among market prices that allow abnormal returns, they do not persist.

Alan Greenspan

Categorized in : People May Abnormal

I have found no greater satisfaction than achieving success through honest dealing and strict adherence to the view that, for you to gain, those you deal with should gain as well.

Alan Greenspan

honesty business success

The number one problem in today's generation and economy is the lack of financial literacy.

Alan Greenspan

todays-generation generations numbers

We can guarantee cash benefits as far out and at whatever size you like, but we cannot guarantee their purchasing power.

Alan Greenspan

investing benefits guarantees

Crony capitalism is essentially a condition in which... public officials are giving favours to people in the private sector in payment of political favours.

Alan Greenspan

dark giving people

I guess I should warn you, if I turn out to be particularly clear, you've probably misunderstood what I've said.

Alan Greenspan

investing misunderstood should

The abandonment of the gold standard made it possible for the welfare statists to use the banking system as a means to an unlimited expansion of credit. In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation. There is no safe store of value. Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the hidden confiscation of wealth. Gold stands in the way of this insidious process. It stands as a protector of property rights. If one grasps this, one has no difficulty in understanding the statists' antagonism toward the gold standard.

Alan Greenspan

understanding rights mean

If I've made myself clear, I've misspoken.

Alan Greenspan

clear ifs made

The United States can pay any debt it has because we can always print money to do that. So there is zero probability of default.

Alan Greenspan

debt united-states zero

I made a mistake in presuming that the self-interests of organisations, specifically banks and others, were such that they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders and their equity in the firms.

Alan Greenspan

self made mistake

The true measure of a career is to be able to be content, even proud, that you succeeded through your own endeavors without leaving a trail of casualties in your wake.

Alan Greenspan

leaving careers happiness

Remember what we're looking at. Gold is a currency. It is still, by all evidence, a premier currency, that no fiat currency, including the dollar, can match.

Alan Greenspan

dollars gold remember

What we have found over the years in the marketplace is that derivatives have been an extraordinarily useful vehicle to transfer risk from those who shouldn't be taking it to those who are willing to and are capable of doing so.

Alan Greenspan

risk business years

Amateurs want to be right. Professionals want to make money.

Alan Greenspan

making-money want

Capitalism is based on self-interest and self-esteem; it holds integrity and trustworthiness as cardinal virtues and makes them pay off in the marketplace, thus demanding that men survive by means of virtue, not vices. It is this superlatively moral system that the welfare statists propose to improve upon by means of preventative law, snooping bureaucrats, and the chronic goad of fear.

Alan Greenspan

self-esteem integrity mean

When trust is lost, a nation's ability to transact business is palpably undermined.

Alan Greenspan

ability nations lost

By far the most significant event in finance during the past decade has been the extraordinary development and expansion of financial derivatives.

Alan Greenspan

expansion events past

In general, corruption tends to exist whenever governments have favors to extend, or something to sell.

Alan Greenspan

favors corruption government

Regulators have not been able to achieve the level of future clarity required to act pre-emptively. The problem is not lack of regulation but unrealistic expectations. What we confront in reality is uncertainty, some of it frighteningly so...

Alan Greenspan

ignorance expectations reality

But rules cannot substitute for character.

Alan Greenspan

substitutes character

Gold still represents the ultimate form of payment in the world. Fiat money in extremis is accepted by nobody. Gold is always accepted.

Alan Greenspan

accepted gold world