Quote

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.

Ben Bernanke

Change background

T

T

T

Change font

More quotes by Ben Bernanke

The Federal Reserve will not monetize the debt.

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.

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

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.

Over the years, the U.S. economy has shown a remarkable ability to absorb shocks of all kinds, to recover, and to continue to grow.

One might as well try to perform brain surgery with a sledgehammer.

Indeed, in general, healthy investment returns cannot be sustained in a weak economy, and of course it is difficult to save for retirement or other goals without the income from a job.

A money-financed tax cut is essentially equivalent to Milton Friedman's famous 'helicopter drop' of money.

It's the price of success: people start to think you're omnipotent.

It takes about two and a half percent growth just to keep unemployment stable.

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.

It's true that the Federal Reserve faces a lot of political pressure and is unpopular in many circles.

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

In the future, my communications with the public and with the markets will be entirely through regular and formal channels.

To avoid large and unsustainable budget deficits, the nation will ultimately have to choose among higher taxes, modifications to entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare, less spending on everything else from education to defense, or some combination of the above.

Among the largest banks, the capital ratios remain good and I don’t expect any serious problems . . . . among the large, internationally active banks that make up a very substantial part of our banking system.