Greenspan Warns of 'Unsustainable' Chinese Stocks, CNN
24 May 24 2007
Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan said on Wednesday he feared a "dramatic contraction" in Chinese stocks but said the global economy may be able to shrug off a drop in asset prices. Addressing a meeting in
Alan Greenspan (born March 6, 1926) is an American economist and was Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve of the
First appointed Fed chairman by President Ronald Reagan in August 1987, he was reappointed at successive four-year intervals until retiring on January 31, 2006, at which time he relinquished the chairmanship to Ben Bernanke.
During the 1950s and 1960s Greenspan was a friend of author Ayn Rand and a proponent of her Objectivist philosophy, which among other things holds that reason, egoism and capitalism are the necessary cornerstones of a free and civilized society. He wrote articles for Objectivist newsletters, and contributed several essays for
Greenspan 1966:
”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. If there were, the government would have to make its holding illegal, as was done in the case of gold. If everyone decided, for example, to convert all his bank deposits to silver or copper or any other good, and thereafter declined to accept checks as payment for goods, bank deposits would lose their purchasing power and government-created bank credit would be worthless as a claim on goods. The financial policy of the welfare state requires that there be no way for the owners of wealth to protect themselves.”
“Money is your means of survival. The verdict you pronounce upon your livelihood is the verdict you pronounce upon your life. If the source is corrupt, you have damned your own existence."
