Paul Krugman Quotes
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You really have to go searching desperately to find any contemporary examples of good, old-fashioned runaway inflation.
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Surely I'm not the only person to ask the obvious question: How different, really, is Mr. Madoff's tale from the story of the investment industry as a whole?
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Wealthy individuals bought themselves a radical right party, believing - correctly - that it would cut their taxes and remove regulations, but failed to realize that eventually the craziness would take on a life of its own, and that the monster they created would turn on its creators as well as the little people.
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But Wall Street people are in fact very smart; they're funny, they're not company men who work their way up the chain.
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There has been plenty to criticize about President Obama’s handling of the economy. Yet the overriding story of the past few years is not Mr. Obama’s mistakes but the scorched-earth opposition of Republicans, who have done everything they can to get in his way - and who now, having blocked the president’s policies, hope to win the White House by claiming that his policies have failed.
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Unsustainable situations usually go on longer than most economists think possible. But they always end, and when they do, it's often painful.
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The problem with digital books is that you can always find what you are looking for but you need to go to a bookstore to find what you weren't looking for.
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A snarky but accurate description of monetary policy over the past five years is that the Federal Reserve successfully replaced the technology bubble with a housing bubble...
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Economists don't usually make good speculators, because they think too much.
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If we discovered that, you know, space aliens were planning to attack and we needed a massive buildup to counter the space alien threat and really inflation and budget deficits took secondary place to that, this slump would be over in 18 months. ... There was a Twilight Zone episode like this in which scientists fake an alien threat in order to achieve world peace. Well, this time, we don't need it, we need it in order to get some fiscal stimulus.
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If you want a simple model for predicting the unemployment rate in the United States over the next few years, here it is: It will be what Greenspan wants it to be, plus or minus a random error reflecting the fact that he is not quite God.
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In short, it's a great economy if you're a high-level corporate executive or someone who owns a lot of stock. For most other Americans, economic growth is a spectator sport.
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One way in which Americans have always been exceptional has been in our support for education. First we took the lead in universal primary education; then the “high school movement” made us the first nation to embrace widespread secondary education.
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Governments do not necessarily act in the national interest, especially when making detailed microeconomic interventions. Instead, they are influenced by interest group pressures. The kinds of interventions that new trade theory suggests can raise national income will typically raise the welfare of small, fortunate groups by large amounts, while imposing costs on larger, more diffuse groups.
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Europe is often held up as a cautionary tale, a demonstration that if you try to make the economy less brutal, to take better care of your fellow citizens when they're down on their luck, you end up killing economic progress. But what European experience actually demonstrates is the opposite: social justice and progress can go hand in hand.
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The goal in the end is not to win elections. The goal is to change society.
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I believe that the only important structural obstacles to world prosperity are the obsolete doctrines that clutter the minds of men.
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People respond to incentives. If unemployment becomes more attractive because of the unemployment benefit, some unemployed workers may no longer try to find a job or may not try to find one as quickly as they would without the benefit.
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On the political as on the economic front it's important not to fall into the "not as bad as" trap. High unemployment isn't O.K. just because it hasn't hit 1933 levels; ominous political trends shouldn’t be dismissed just because there’s no Hitler in sight.
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It's a funny thing, by the way, how people who love free markets are also quite sure that they know that investors are being irrational.
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Coming up with a good idea, with an insight into the way the world works that is really new and that you really believe in, is a deeply satisfying experience.
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Seven habits that help produce the anything-but-efficient markets that rule the world. 1. Think short term. 2. Be greedy. 3. Believe in the greater fool 4. Run with the herd. 5. Overgeneralize 6. Be trendy 7. Play with other people's money
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When the Fed decides that inflation is too high, they have the tools, and they've shown historically that they have the will, to bring it down. And, it might be painful.
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The key reason executives are paid so much now is that they appoint the members of the corporate board that determines their compensation and control many of the perks that board members count on. So it's not the invisible hand of the market that leads to those monumental executive incomes; it's the invisible handshake in the boardroom.