Alan Greenspan

I'm a free-market economist from years and years back, and I've never veered from that. ”

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

The only way you get economic progress, real standards of living moving higher, is to have the savings of the society continuously invested in the cutting-edge technologies. And those technologies which are obsolescent get dropped out. ”

There is a limit to how much the United States Treasury can borrow. ”

Much fiscal policy is implemented, not through spending increases, but through tax credits and other so-called tax expenditures. The markets should respond to them as they do spending cuts, with little contraction in economic activity. ”

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. ”

I do not understand where the backing of Bitcoin is coming from. There is no fundamental issue of capabilities of repaying it in anything which is universally acceptable, which is either intrinsic value of the currency or the credit or trust of the individual who is issuing the money, whether it's a government or an individual. ”

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. ”

What a sound money system does is to stabilize all the elements in it, and reduces the uncertainty that people confront. And the one thing all human beings do when they are confronted with uncertainty is pull back, withdraw, disengage, and that means economic activity, which is really dealing with people, just goes straight down. ”

It's hard to tell which assets will be toxic. The best way to ensure that only shareholders and banks feel it is have adequate capital. ”