Ben Bernanke Quotes
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As you know, in the latter part of 2008 and early 2009, the Federal Reserve took extraordinary steps to provide liquidity and support credit market functioning, including the establishment of a number of emergency lending facilities and the creation or extension of currency swap agreements with 14 central banks around the world.
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If two people always agree, one of them is redundant.
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The downturn following the collapse of Japan's so-called bubble economy of the 1980s was not as severe as the Great Depression.
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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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The crisis in Europe has affected the U.S. economy by acting as a drag on our exports, weighing on business and consumer confidence, and pressuring U.S. financial markets and institutions.
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The movement toward a holistic approach to community development has been long in the making, but the housing crisis has motivated further progress.
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All the Federal Reserve can do is make loans against collateral.
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How much would you pay to avoid a second Depression?
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Clear communication is always important in central banking, but it can be especially important when economic conditions call for further policy stimulus but the policy rate is already at its effective lower bound.
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It's the price of success: people start to think you're omnipotent.
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I do not subscribe to any rigid and mechanical rule ... I intend to be flexible and to learn from experience.
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If bankers become overly conservative in response to past lending mistakes - or if examiners force such behavior - it will hurt bankers' own long-term interests and the economy in general.
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In the future, financial firms of any type whose failure would pose a systemic risk must accept especially close regulatory scrutiny of their risk-taking.
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Economic engineering is about the design and analysis of frameworks for achieving specific economic objectives.
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History proves... that a smart central bank can protect the economy and the financial sector from the nastier side effects of a stock market collapse.
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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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Inflation is up, driven by energy prices. Underlying core rates remain low, which is encouraging.
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Preventing liquidation of an unbalanced market will leave you in tears.
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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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The risk exists that, with aggregate demand exhibiting considerable momentum, output could overshoot its sustainable path, leading ultimately in the absence of countervailing monetary policy action to further upward pressure on inflation.
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In any given month, a large number of workers are being hired or are leaving their current jobs, illustrating the dynamism of the U.S. labor market.
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If the fiscal cliff occurs, I don't think the Federal Reserve has the tools to offset that event.
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Because a person has to be either working or looking for work to be counted as part of the labor force, an increase in the number of people too discouraged to continue their search for work would reduce the unemployment rate, all else being equal - but not for a positive reason.
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I think one of the lessons of the Depression - and this is something that Franklin Roosevelt demonstrated - was that when orthodoxy fails, then you need to try new things. And he was very willing to try unorthodox approaches when the orthodox approach had shown that it was not adequate.