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

Ben Bernanke

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More quotes by Ben Bernanke

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Nobody really understands gold prices and I don't pretend to understand them either.

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.

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

With respect to their safety, derivatives, for the most part, are traded among very sophisticated financial institutions and individuals who have considerable incentive to understand them and to use them properly.

Our mission, as set forth by the Congress is a critical one: to preserve price stability, to foster maximum sustainable growth in output and employment, and to promote a stable and efficient financial system that serves all Americans well and fairly.

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.