Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan (the oracle)

“It seems superfluous to constrain trading in some of the newer derivatives and other innovative financial contracts of the past decade"

“Risks in financial markets, including derivatives markets, are being regulated by private parties”

“There is nothing involved in federal regulation per se which makes it superior to market regulation”

“I believe that the general growth in large institutions have occurred in the context of an underlying structure of markets in which many of the larger risks are dramatically — I should say, fully — hedged"

“Governments and central banks, could not have altered the course of the boom”

“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”

"More conclusive signs of pending home price stability are likely to become visible in the first half of 2009"