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

Ben Bernanke

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More quotes by Ben Bernanke

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

I am very proud of my nerd-dom.

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 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.

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

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.