AG's remarks for September 8, 1999
Remarks by Chairman Alan Greenspan
Maintaining Economic Vitality
Millennium Lecture Series, sponsored by the Gerald R. Ford Foundation and Grand Valley State University, Grand Rapids, Michigan
September 8, 1999
bog.frb.fed.us
It is safe to say that we are witnessing this decade, in the United States, history's most compelling demonstration of the productive capacity of free peoples operating in free markets.
The quintessential manifestations of America's industrial might earlier this century--large steel mills, auto assembly plants, petrochemical complexes, and skyscrapers--have been replaced by a gross domestic product that has been downsized as ideas have replaced physical bulk and effort as creators of value. Today, economic value is best symbolized by exceedingly complex, miniaturized integrated circuits and the ideas--the software--that utilize them. Most of what we currently perceive as value and wealth is intellectual and impalpable.
How is this remarkable economic machine to be maintained, and how can we better ensure that its benefits reach the greatest number of people?
CB - This speech doesn't sound like somebody who is trying to take the punch bowl away, nor does it indicate that the Fed is ignorant of the benefits of new economic realities.
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