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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

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More quotes by Ben Bernanke

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

I and others were mistaken early on in saying that the subprime crisis would be contained. The causal relationship between the housing problem and the broad financial system was very complex and difficult to predict.

The economist John Maynard Keynes said that in the long run, we are all dead. If he were around today he might say that, in the long run, we are all on Social Security and Medicare.

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

The Federal Reserve is not currently forecasting a recession.

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

The American people are among the most productive in the world. We have the best technologies. We have - great universities. We have entrepreneurs.

If you are not happy with yourself, even the loftiest achievements won't bring you much satisfaction.

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

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.

Life is amazingly unpredictable any 22-year-old who thinks they know where they will be in 10 years, much less in 30, is simply lacking imagination.

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 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.

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

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.

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