Ben Bernanke Quotes
-
The Fed needs an approach that consolidates the gains of the Greenspan years and ensures that those successful policies will continue - even if future Fed chairmen are less skillful or less committed to price stability than Mr. Greenspan has been.
-
The resilience of the economy ... is helping it to absorb the shocks to energy and transportation from the hurricanes.
-
Stronger regulation and supervision aimed at problems with underwriting practices and lenders' risk management would have been a more effective and surgical approach to constraining the housing bubble than a general increase in interest rates.
-
Monetary policy is a blunt tool which certainly affects the distribution of income and wealth, although whether the net effect is to increase or reduce inequality is not clear.
-
Of course, a decision to take no action at a particular meeting does not preclude action at subsequent meetings.
-
Our financial system is so complicated and so interactive - so many different markets in different countries and so many sets of rules.
-
Obviously, I haven't succeeded in defusing the political concerns about the Fed.
-
Our mission as set forth by the Congress is a critical one.
-
A.I.G. was even larger than Lehman, with a substantial presence in derivatives and debt markets, as well as in insurance markets.
-
I personally would have preferred if the Fed had been a little less aggressive.
-
After the 1929 crash, the Federal Reserve mistakenly focused its policies on preserving the gold value of the dollar rather than on stabilizing the domestic economy.
-
Investment banks manage to go bankrupt through their investment-banking activities, commercial banks manage to go bankrupt through their commercial-banking activities.
-
There is a deficit; I'd like to see it lowered. But it's up to Congress to decide whether that should be done by higher taxes, lower spending or some combination.
-
Building a rainy-day fund during good times may not be politically popular, but it can pay off during the bad times.
-
So far, the effects appear to be relatively modest on growth.
-
Remember that physical beauty is evolution's way of assuring us that the other person doesn't have too many intestinal parasites.
-
Consumers going through foreclosure typically will see their credit scores drop, raising longer-term questions about their ability to rebound financially and perhaps pursue a more sustainable home purchase at some later point.
-
The lesson of history is that you do not get a sustained economic recovery as long as the financial system is in crisis.
-
The risk that the economy has entered a substantial downturn appears to have diminished over the past month or so.
-
After several false starts, the economy is showing signs of sustained recovery.
-
No one will lend at a negative interest rate; potential creditors will simply choose to hold cash, which pays zero nominal interest.
-
The best approach here if at all possible is to use supervisory and regulatory methods to restrain undue risk-taking and to make sure the system is resilient in case an asset price bubble bursts in the future.
-
In the future, my communications with the public and with the markets will be entirely through regular and formal channels.
-
The policies and policy strategies established during the Greenspan years.