Ben Bernanke Quotes
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The lesson of history is that you do not get a sustained economic recovery as long as the financial system is in crisis.
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Neighborhoods and communities are complex organisms that will be resilient only if they are healthy along a number of interrelated dimensions, much as a human body cannot be healthy without adequate air, water, rest, and food.
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Our assessment currently is that the risks to inflation are perhaps the more significant at the moment, and we need to address that.
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All the Federal Reserve can do is make loans against collateral.
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Market discipline can only limit moral hazard to the extent that debt and equity holders believe that, in the event of distress, they will bear costs.
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I personally would have preferred if the Fed had been a little less aggressive.
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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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The economic repercussions of a stock market crash depend less on the severity of the crash itself than on the response of economic policymakers, particularly central bankers.
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The basic prescription for preventing deflation is straightforward, at least in principle: Use monetary and fiscal policy as needed to support aggregate spending, in a manner as nearly consistent as possible with full utilization of economic resources and low and stable inflation. In other words, the best way to get out of trouble is not to get into it in the first place.
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So far, the effects appear to be relatively modest on growth.
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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.
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I think at this point in time that the inverted yield curve is not signaling a slowdown.
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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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The American people are among the most productive in the world. We have the best technologies. We have great universities. We have entrepreneurs.
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To support continued healthy growth, vigilance in regard to inflation is essential.
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Under a cold turkey strategy, at each policy meeting the Federal Open Market Committee would make its best guess about where it ultimately wants the funds rate to be and would move to that rate in a single step.
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We do not expect significant spillovers from the subprime market to the rest of the economy or to the financial system.
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I think that having good data, good statistics-and the United States generally has better macroeconomic statistics than most countries-and having good economists to interpret those data and present the policy alternatives, has a substantially beneficial effect on policymaking in the United States.
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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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It's true that the Federal Reserve faces a lot of political pressure and is unpopular in many circles.
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Clearly it's going to affect the Gulf Coast economy quite a bit. You've had a lot of property damage. Basic services are down.
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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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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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The impact on the broader economy and financial markets of the problems in the subprime markets seems likely to be contained.