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It takes about two and a half percent growth just to keep unemployment stable.

Ben Bernanke

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More quotes by Ben Bernanke

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

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

I am very proud of my nerd-dom.

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.

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

Over the years, the U.S. economy has shown a remarkable ability to absorb shocks of all kinds, to recover, and to continue to grow.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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