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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.

Ben Bernanke

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More quotes by Ben Bernanke

The sources of deflation are not a mystery. Deflation is in almost all cases a side effect of a collapse of aggregate demand.. a drop in spending so severe that producers must cut prices on an ongoing basis in order to find buyers.

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

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

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

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

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

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 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.

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

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.

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

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.

I don't think that Chinese ownership of U.S. assets is so large as to put our country at risk economically.

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.