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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.

Ben Bernanke

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More quotes by Ben Bernanke

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.

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

The Federal Reserve is not currently forecasting a recession.

I am very proud of my nerd-dom.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Speaking as somebody who has been happily married for 35 years, I can't imagine any choice more consequential for a lifelong journey than the choice of a traveling companion.