“So why do we need a central bank?” (“Warum brauchen wir eine Zentralbank?”). Diese Frage wurde Alan Greenspan in einem Interview während einer Sendung des FOX Business Network gestellt. Hier seine Antwort:

“Well the question is a very interesting one. We have at this particular stage a fiat money which is essentially money printed by a government and it’s usually the central bank which is authorized to do so. Some mechanism has got to be in place that restricts the amount of money which is produced, either a gold standard or currency board or something of that nature because unless you do that, all of history suggests that inflation will take hold with very deleterious effects on economic activity. [...] There are numbers of us, myself included, who strongly believe that we did very well in the 1870-1914 period with an international gold standard”.

Der Moderator fügte noch hinzu: “We did well without the Federal Reserve. People forget that.”