Janet Yellen Quotes

I am anxious to fix welfare. There has to be more training and child care.

The distribution of wealth is even more unequal than that of income ... The wealthiest 5% of American households held 54% of all wealth reported in the 1989 survey. Their share rose to 61% in 2010 and reached 63% in 2013. By contrast, the rest of those in the top half of the wealth distribution -families that in 2013 had a net worth between $81,000 and $1.9 million -held 43% of wealth in 1989 and only 36% in 2013.

It slightly worries me that when people find a problem, they rush to judgment of what to do.

Productivity growth, however it occurs, has a disruptive side to it. In the short term, most things that contribute to productivity growth are very painful.

In the long run, outsourcing is another form of trade that benefits the U.S. economy by giving us cheaper ways to do things.

If it were possible to take interest rates into negative territory I would be voting for that.

Are deviations from full employment a social problem? Obviously.

Strapped by tight credit and plummeting sales, businesses have overhauled the way they manage supply chains, inventory, production practices and staffing.

To me, a wise and humane policy is occasionally to let inflation rise even when inflation is running above target.

People stop buying things, and that is how you turn a slowdown into a recession.

Long-term unemployment can make any worker progressively less employable, even after the economy strengthens.

Although most Americans apparently loathe inflation, Yale economists have argued that a little inflation may be necessary to grease the wheels of the labor market and enable efficiency-enhancing changes in relative pay to occur without requiring nominal wage cuts by workers.

In the five years since the end of the Great Recession, the economy has made considerable progress in recovering from the largest and most sustained loss of employment in the United States since the Great Depression.

A clear lesson of history is that a 'sine qua non' for sustained economic recovery following a financial crisis is a thoroughgoing repair of the financial system.

At the federal level, the fiscal stimulus of 2008 and 2009 supported economic output, but the effects of that stimulus faded; by 2011, federal fiscal policy actions became a drag on output growth when the recovery was still weak.

Business students are very oriented to playing a role in the real world and accomplishing something, not training themselves to be scholars and contribute to the literature. Teaching in that kind of environment has focused me much more on the real world, how pieces of the theory I know can be applied to real-world situations.

The Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) is committed to policies that promote maximum employment and price stability, consistent with our mandate from Congress.

Will capitalist economies operate at full employment in the absence of routine intervention? Certainly not. Do policy makers have the knowledge and ability to improve macroeconomic outcomes rather than make matters worse? Yes.

Models used to describe and predict inflation commonly distinguish between changes in food and energy prices - which enter into total inflation - and movements in the prices of other goods and services - that is, core inflation.

By some estimates, income and wealth inequality are near their highest levels in the past hundred years, much higher than the average during that time span and probably higher than for much of American history before then.

We do not interpret bitcoin's popularity as having a relationship with the public's view of the Federal Reserve's conduct of monetary policy

My bottom line is that monetary policy should react to rising prices for houses or other assets only insofar as they affect the central bank's goal variables - output, employment, and inflation.

Uncertainty about sales impedes business planning and could harm capital formation just as much as uncertainty about inflation can create uncertainty about relative prices and harm business planning.

One common way of judging whether housing's price is in line with its fundamental value is to consider the ratio of housing prices to rents. This is analogous to the ratio of prices to dividends for stocks.

Labor force participation peaked in early 2000, so its decline began well before the Great Recession. A portion of that decline clearly relates to the aging of the baby boom generation. But the pace of decline accelerated with the recession.

[A] major source of wealth for many families is financial assets, including stocks, bonds, mutual funds, and private pensions ... the wealthiest 5 percent of households held nearly two-thirds of all such assets in 2013

Productivity depends on many factors, including our workforce's knowledge and skills and the quantity and quality of the capital, technology, and infrastructure that they have to work with.

The Federal Reserve's objectives of maximum employment and price stability do not, by themselves, ensure a strong pace of economic growth or an improvement in living standards. The most important factor determining living standards is productivity growth, defined as increases in how much can be produced in an hour of work.

Transparency concerning the Federal Reserve's conduct of monetary policy is desirable because better public understanding enhances the effectiveness of policy. More important, however, is that transparent communications reflect the Federal Reserve's commitment to accountability within our democratic system of government.

A crucial responsibility of any central bank is to control inflation, the average rate of increase in the prices of a broad group of goods and services.

Nationally, the share of mortgages that are underwater fell by about one-half between 2011 and 2014.

In government institutions and in teaching, you need to inspire confidence. To achieve credibility, you have to very clearly explain what you are doing and why. The same principles apply to businesses.

The trust institutions have in the marketplace, the confidence customers and suppliers and workers and employees have, are very important to a business's effectiveness.

We need to increase the transparency of shadow banking markets so that authorities can monitor for signs of excessive leverage and unstable maturity transformation outside regulated banks.

When you're unemployed for six months or a year, it is hard to qualify for a lease, so even the option of relocating to find a job is often off the table.

The bottom line for housing is that the concerns we used to hear about the possibility of a devastating collapse - one that might be big enough to cause a recession in the U.S. economy - while not fully allayed have diminished. Moreover, while the future for housing activity remains uncertain, I think there is a reasonable chance that housing is in the process of stabilizing, which would mean that it would put a considerably smaller drag on the economy going forward.

The lower half of households by wealth held just 3% of wealth in 1989 and only 1% in 2013.

For my own part, I did not see and did not appreciate what the risks were with securitization, the credit ratings agencies, the shadow banking system, the S.I.V.'s - I didn't see any of that coming until it happened.

I think it is appropriate to ask whether this trend is compatible with values rooted in our nation's history, among them the high value Americans have traditionally placed on equality of opportunity.