Ben Bernanke Quotes
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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.
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Investment banks manage to go bankrupt through their investment-banking activities, commercial banks manage to go bankrupt through their commercial-banking activities.
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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.
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If you want to understand geology, study earthquakes. If you want to understand the economy, study the Depression.
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Our financial system is so complicated and so interactive - so many different markets in different countries and so many sets of rules.
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The resilience of the economy ... is helping it to absorb the shocks to energy and transportation from the hurricanes.
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Economic management involves the operation of economic frameworks in real time - for example, in the private sector, the management of complex financial institutions or, in the public sector, the day-to-day supervision of those institutions.
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Building a rainy-day fund during good times may not be politically popular, but it can pay off during the bad times.
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The risk that the economy has entered a substantial downturn appears to have diminished over the past month or so.
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Evolutionary psychologists suggest that humans experienced evolutionary benefits from brain developments that included aversion to loss and risk and from instincts for cooperation that helped strengthen communities.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I personally would have preferred if the Fed had been a little less aggressive.
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After several false starts, the economy is showing signs of sustained recovery.
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Our mission as set forth by the Congress is a critical one.
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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.
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Developments in financial markets can have broad economic effects felt by many outside the markets.
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When prices are stable, people can hold money for transactions and other purposes without having to worry that inflation will eat away at the real value of their money balances.
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Certainly there is no way to direct the effects of monetary policy at a single class of assets while leaving other financial markets and the broader economy untouched. One might as well try to perform brain surgery with a sledgehammer.
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I and others were mistaken early on in saying that the subprime crisis would be contained. The causal relationship between the housing problem and the broad financial system was very complex and difficult to predict.
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A.I.G. was even larger than Lehman, with a substantial presence in derivatives and debt markets, as well as in insurance markets.
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No one will lend at a negative interest rate; potential creditors will simply choose to hold cash, which pays zero nominal interest.
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Remember that physical beauty is evolution's way of assuring us that the other person doesn't have too many intestinal parasites.