Ben Bernanke Quotes

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.

The downturn following the collapse of Japan's so-called bubble economy of the 1980s was not as severe as the Great Depression.

Nobody likes to fail but failure is an essential part of life and of learning. If your uniform isn't dirty, you haven't been in the game.

Banks will have to win the confidence of their customers through fair dealing, making good loans, and remaining financially healthy.

If Wall Street crashes, does Main Street follow? Not necessarily.

Both humanity's capacity to innovate and the incentives to innovate are greater today than at any other time in history.

In a mature economy like India's, which is becoming modern and a financially-oriented economy, an independent central bank, responsible central bank, is really central to success.

Developments in financial markets can have broad economic effects felt by many outside the markets.

China is growing very quickly and is clearly becoming an important player in the world economy.

I am particularly pleased to see that the Bendheim Center for Finance is thriving.

To be sure, faster growth in nominal labor compensation does not necessarily portend higher inflation.

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.

Deflation is defined as a general decline in prices, with emphasis on the word 'general.'

The U.S. government has a technology, called a printing press (or today, its electronic equivalent), that allows it to produce as many U.S. dollars as it wishes at no cost.

Rents should begin to decelerate as the demand for owner-occupied housing stabilizes and the supply of rental units increases.

In many spheres of human endeavor, from science to business to education to economic policy, good decisions depend on good measurement.

I was a professor at Princeton University. And, in that capacity, I studied for many years the role of financial crisis in the economy.

Not all information is beneficial.

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.

Banks need to continue to lend to creditworthy borrowers to earn a profit and remain strong.

[Virtual Currencies] may hold long-term promise, particularly if the innovations Promote a faster, more secure and more efficient payment system.

Growth in U.S. real imports slowed to about 3 percent in 2006, in part reflecting a drop in real terms in imports of crude oil and petroleum products.

I assure this committee that, if I am confirmed, I will be strictly independent of all political influences ... essential to that institution's ability to function effectively and achieve its mandated objectives.

In all likelihood, a significant amount of time will be required to restore the nearly eight and a half million jobs that were lost nationwide over 2008 and 2009.

If you take a candy bar in the short run, it gives you a burst of energy, but after a while, it just makes you fat.

The role of liquidity in systemic events provides yet another reason why, in the future, a more system wide or macroprudential approach to regulation is needed.

For many of us, owning a home signaled a passage into adulthood that coincided with the start of a career and family.

I got into economics because I wanted to make things better for the average person.

Economics is a highly sophisticated field of thought that is superb at explaining to policymakers precisely why the choices they made in the past were wrong. About the future, not so much.

The central bank needs to be able to make policy without short term political concerns.

The world has a great deal more to offer than money.

Of course, economic forecasts must be revised when new information arrives and are thus necessarily provisional.

If you want to understand geology, study earthquakes. If you want to understand the economy, study the Depression.

The GSEs are adequately capitalized. They are in no danger of failing.

I served seven years as the chair of the Princeton economics department where I had responsibility for major policy decisions, such as whether to serve bagels or doughnuts at the department coffee hour.

Obviously, I haven't succeeded in defusing the political concerns about the Fed.

Preventing liquidation of an unbalanced market will leave you in tears.

I am confident that we will meet whatever challenges the future may bring.

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.

Honest error in the face of complex and possibly intractable problems is a far more important source of bad results than are bad motives.

Like gold, U.S. dollars have value only to the extent that they are strictly limited in supply. But the U.S. government has a technology, called a printing press (or, today, its electronic equivalent), that allows it to produce as many U.S. dollars as it wishes at essentially no cost. By increasing the number of U.S. dollars in circulation, or even by credibly threatening to do so, the U.S. government can also reduce the value of a dollar in terms of goods and services, which is equivalent to raising the prices in dollars of those goods and services.

The Federal Reserve can only buy Treasuries and agencies, and moreover quantitative easing typically involves buying longer-term Treasuries and agencies in terms of bills, for example.

I generally leave the details of fiscal programs to the Administration and Congress. That's really their area of authority and responsibility, and I don't think it's appropriate for me to second guess.

The Federal Reserve's job is to do the right thing, to take the long-run interest of the economy to heart, and that sometimes means being unpopular. But we have to do the right thing.

The actions taken by central banks and other authorities to stabilize a panic in the short run can work against stability in the long run if investors and firms infer from those actions that they will never bear the full consequences of excessive risk-taking.

The Federal Reserve is not currently forecasting a recession.

Fostering transparency and accountability at the Federal Reserve was one of my principal objectives when I became Chairman in February 2006.

I don't see much evidence of an equity bubble,

The more guidance a central bank can provide the public about how policy is likely to evolve the greater the chance that market participants will make appropriate inferences.

Building a rainy-day fund during good times may not be politically popular, but it can pay off during the bad times.

The crisis and recession have led to very low interest rates, it is true, but these events have also destroyed jobs, hamstrung economic growth and led to sharp declines in the values of many homes and businesses.

I'd throw dollars out of helicopters if I had to, to stimulate the economy.

If the fiscal cliff occurs, I don't think the Federal Reserve has the tools to offset that event.

Uncertainty is seen to retard investment independently of considerations of risk or expected return.

Monetary policy has less room to maneuver when interest rates are close to zero, while expansionary fiscal policy is likely both more effective and less costly in terms of increased debt burden when interest rates are pinned at low levels.

A gold standard doesn't imply stability in the prices of the goods and services that people buy every day, it implies a stability in the price of gold itself.

I am very proud of my nerd-dom.

The Federal Reserve has the capacity to operate in domestic money markets to maintain interest rates at a level consistent with our economic goals

One would be forgiven for concluding that the assumed benefits of financial innovation are not all they were cracked up to be.

September and October of 2008 was the worst financial crisis in global history, including the Great Depression,

If you are asking me if I would advocate that the Chinese go to greater flexibility in their exchange rate, I certainly would.

In the tradition of national income accounting, economic policymakers have typically focused on variables such as income, wealth, and consumption.

No economy can succeed without a high-quality workforce, particularly in an age of globalization and technical change.

When historical relationships are taken into account, it is difficult to ascribe the house price bubble either to monetary policy or to the broader macroeconomic environment.

The Federal Reserve will not monetize the debt.

Among other objectives, liquidity guidelines must take into account the risks that inadequate liquidity planning by major financial firms pose for the broader financial system, and they must ensure that these firms do not become excessively reliant on liquidity support from the central bank.

There are limits to monetary policy.

The banks have accounts with the Fed, much the same way that you have an account in a commercial bank.

The benefit of appointing a hawkish central banker is the increased inflation-fighting credibility that such an appointment brings.

While rising delinquencies and foreclosures will continue to weigh heavily on the housing market this year, it will not cripple the U.S.

I don't fully understand movements in the gold price

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.

The biggest downside of my current job is that I have to wear a suit to work. Wearing uncomfortable clothes on purpose is an example of what former Princeton hockey player and Nobel Prize winner Michael Spence taught economists to call 'signaling.'

Every effort needs to be made to try and offset the costs of Katrina and Rita by reductions in other government programs, especially those that are wasteful, duplicative and ineffective.

As an educator myself, I understand the profound effect that good teachers and a quality education have on the lives of our young people.

Education - lifelong education for everyone - from toddlers to workers well advanced in their careers - is indeed an excellent investment for individuals and society as a whole.

I have spoken about deficits, and I think deficits are important because they address broad economic and financial stability. We need to talk about that.

Monetary policy cannot do much about long-run growth, all we can try to do is to try to smooth out periods where the economy is depressed because of lack of demand.

Sector-specific price declines, uncomfortable as they may be for producers in that sector, are generally not a problem for the economy as a whole and do not constitute deflation.

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.

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.

The Federal Reserve has always recognized the importance of allowing markets to work, and government oversight of financial firms will never be fully effective without the aid of strong market discipline.

The financial crisis that began in the summer of 2007 was an extraordinarily complex event with multiple causes.

The Federal Reserve, like other central banks, wields powerful tools; democratic accountability requires that the public be able to see how and for what purposes those tools are being used.

The one thing people don't appreciate, I think, is that central banking is not a new development. It's been around for a very long time.

Community development has a long history of innovation and learning from experience.

The more important reason is that the research itself provides an important long-run perspective on the issues that we face on a day-to-day basis.

Most of the policies that support robust economic growth in the long run are outside the province of the central bank.

Our financial system is so complicated and so interactive - so many different markets in different countries and so many sets of rules.

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.

The financial crisis appears to be mostly behind us, and the economy seems to have stabilized and is expanding again.

We do not expect significant spillovers from the subprime market to the rest of the economy or to the financial system.

There are a number of institutions globally where the Federal Reserve typically leads the U.S. effort to work with financial regulators from other countries, and we try to, to the extent possible, establish international standards for how - the amount of capital a bank should hold, for example, or how much.

Remember that physical beauty is evolution's way of assuring us that the other person doesn't have too many intestinal parasites.

All the Federal Reserve can do is make loans against collateral.

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.

To be sure, the provision of liquidity alone can by no means solve the problems of credit risk and credit losses; but it can reduce liquidity premiums, help restore the confidence of investors, and thus promote stability.

Economics is a very difficult subject. I've compared it to trying to learn how to repair a car when the engine is running.

If Australia finds it has a strong Australian dollar, and it has higher unemployment, then it would have to respond, and that would either be by increasing domestic demand or by weakening its own currency.

I came home from school one day, and there was a phone call for me. And I picked up the phone. They said, 'This is the Harvard Admissions Department. We'd like to let you know that you're accepted in the freshman class.' And I said, 'Come on, who is this really?'