Top 100 Ben Bernanke Quotes
#1. The banks have accounts with the Fed, much the same way that you have an account in a commercial bank.
Ben Bernanke
#2. We should see better and more direct measurements of economic well being.
Ben Bernanke
#3. Developments in financial markets can have broad economic effects felt by many outside the markets.
Ben Bernanke
#4. 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.
Ben Bernanke
#5. The American people are among the most productive in the world. We have the best technologies. We have great universities. We have entrepreneurs.
Ben Bernanke
#6. No one will lend at a negative interest rate; potential creditors will simply choose to hold cash, which pays zero nominal interest.
Ben Bernanke
#7. Every effort needs to be made to try and offset the costs of Katrina and Rita by reductions in other government programs, especially those that are wasteful, duplicative and ineffective.
Ben Bernanke
#8. I don't fully understand movements in the gold price
Ben Bernanke
#9. A collapse in U.S. stock prices certainly would cause a lot of white knuckles on Wall Street.
Ben Bernanke
#10. Neighborhoods and communities are complex organisms that will be resilient only if they are healthy along a number of interrelated dimensions, much as a human body cannot be healthy without adequate air, water, rest, and food.
Ben Bernanke
#11. The Libor system is structurally flawed. It is a major problem for our financial system and for the confidence in the financial system. We need to address it.
Ben Bernanke
#12. 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.
Ben Bernanke
#13. For practitioners of community development, as in any field, joining a network of like-minded professionals is important for building skills and becoming aware of opportunities and resources.
Ben Bernanke
#14. In the typical economic recovery, a resurgent housing sector helps fuel reemployment and rising incomes.
Ben Bernanke
#15. If you take a candy bar in the short run, it gives you a burst of energy, but after a while, it just makes you fat.
Ben Bernanke
#16. Different countries have different kinds of financial structures.
Ben Bernanke
#17. The Federal Reserve is not currently forecasting a recession.
Ben Bernanke
#18. China is growing very quickly and is clearly becoming an important player in the world economy.
Ben Bernanke
#19. If Australia finds it has a strong Australian dollar, and it has higher unemployment, then it would have to respond, and that would either be by increasing domestic demand or by weakening its own currency.
Ben Bernanke
#20. It's the price of success: people start to think you're omnipotent.
Ben Bernanke
#21. One would be forgiven for concluding that the assumed benefits of financial innovation are not all they were cracked up to be.
Ben Bernanke
#22. History has demonstrated time and again the inherent resilience and recuperative powers of the American economy.
Ben Bernanke
#23. As an educator myself, I understand the profound effect that good teachers and a quality education have on the lives of our young people.
Ben Bernanke
#24. 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.
Ben Bernanke
#25. The Federal Reserve has the capacity to operate in domestic money markets to maintain interest rates at a level consistent with our economic goals
Ben Bernanke
#26. To the extent that bank panics interfere with normal flows of credit, they may affect the performance of the real economy.
Ben Bernanke
#27. In many spheres of human endeavor, from science to business to education to economic policy, good decisions depend on good measurement.
Ben Bernanke
#28. [Virtual Currencies] may hold long-term promise, particularly if the innovations Promote a faster, more secure and more efficient payment system.
Ben Bernanke
#29. If current trends continue, the typical U.S. worker will be considerably more productive several decades from now. Thus, one might argue that letting future generations bear the burden of population aging is appropriate, as they will likely be richer than we are even taking that burden into account.
Ben Bernanke
#31. The biggest downside of my current job is that I have to wear a suit to work. Wearing uncomfortable clothes on purpose is an example of what former Princeton hockey player and Nobel Prize winner Michael Spence taught economists to call 'signaling.'
Ben Bernanke
#32. Most of the policies that support robust economic growth in the long run are outside the province of the central bank.
Ben Bernanke
#33. I come from Main Street, from a small town that's really depressed.
Ben Bernanke
#34. If you're in a car crash, you're mostly involved in trying to not go off the bridge, and later on you say, 'Oh my God!'
Ben Bernanke
#35. The downturn following the collapse of Japan's so-called bubble economy of the 1980s was not as severe as the Great Depression.
Ben Bernanke
#36. It is not the responsibility of the Federal Bank - nor would it be appropriate - to protect lenders and investors from the consequences of their decisions
Ben Bernanke
#37. Imperfect substitutability of assets implies that changes in the supplies of various assets available to private investors may affect the prices and yields of those assets.
Ben Bernanke
#38. Small businesses have played an important role in fueling past economic recoveries.
Ben Bernanke
#40. Of course, economic forecasts must be revised when new information arrives and are thus necessarily provisional.
Ben Bernanke
#41. A money-financed tax cut is essentially equivalent to Milton Friedman's famous 'helicopter drop' of money.
Ben Bernanke
#42. Monetary policy is a blunt tool which certainly affects the distribution of income and wealth, although whether the net effect is to increase or reduce inequality is not clear.
Ben Bernanke
#43. To achieve a more balanced international system over time, countries with excessive and unsustainable trade surpluses will need to allow their exchange rates to better reflect market fundamentals.
Ben Bernanke
#44. There will not be an automatic increase in interest rate when unemployment hits 6.5%.
Ben Bernanke
#45. Because a person has to be either working or looking for work to be counted as part of the labor force, an increase in the number of people too discouraged to continue their search for work would reduce the unemployment rate, all else being equal - but not for a positive reason.
Ben Bernanke
#46. The public in many countries is understandably concerned by the commitment of substantial government resources to aid the financial industry when other industries receive little or no assistance. This disparate treatment, unappealing as it is, appears unavoidable.
Ben Bernanke
#47. Monetary policy cannot do much about long-run growth, all we can try to do is to try to smooth out periods where the economy is depressed because of lack of demand.
Ben Bernanke
#48. Economic engineering is about the design and analysis of frameworks for achieving specific economic objectives.
Ben Bernanke
#49. Textbooks describe economics as the study of the allocation of scarce resources. That definition may be the 'what,' but it certainly is not the 'why.'
Ben Bernanke
#50. The world has a great deal more to offer than money.
Ben Bernanke
#51. I came home from school one day, and there was a phone call for me. And I picked up the phone. They said, 'This is the Harvard Admissions Department. We'd like to let you know that you're accepted in the freshman class.' And I said, 'Come on, who is this really?'
Ben Bernanke
#52. Deflation can be particularly dangerous when a financial system is shaky, with household and corporate balance sheets in poor shape and banks undercapitalized and heavily burdened with bad loans.
Ben Bernanke
#53. The decline in home equity makes it more difficult for struggling homeowners to refinance and reduces the financial incentive of stressed borrowers to remain in their homes.
Ben Bernanke
#54. Home purchases that are very highly leveraged or unaffordable subject the borrower and lender to a great deal of risk. Moreover, even in a strong economy, unforeseen life events and risks in local real estate markets make highly leveraged borrowers vulnerable.
Ben Bernanke
#55. The stress on the financial system in the fall of 2007 was significant, but not so significant as to threaten the overall stability of the U.S. economy, although it did lead to the beginning of a recession at the end of 2007.
Ben Bernanke
#56. The crisis and recession have led to very low interest rates, it is true, but these events have also destroyed jobs, hamstrung economic growth and led to sharp declines in the values of many homes and businesses.
Ben Bernanke
#57. The Depression was an incredibly dramatic episode - an era of stock-market crashes, breadlines, bank runs and wild currency speculation, with the storm clouds of war gathering ominously in the background ... For my money, few periods are so replete with human interest.
Ben Bernanke
#58. Now that I'm a civilian again, I can once more comment on economic and financial issues without my words being put under the microscope by Fed watchers.
Ben Bernanke
#59. The financial crisis appears to be mostly behind us, and the economy seems to have stabilized and is expanding again.
Ben Bernanke
#60. 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
#61. The U.S. government has a technology, called a printing press (or today, its electronic equivalent), that allows it to produce as many U.S. dollars as it wishes at no cost.
Ben Bernanke
#62. I don't see much evidence of an equity bubble,
Ben Bernanke
#63. 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.
Ben Bernanke
#64. In a slow-growing world that is short on aggregate demand, Germany's trade surplus is a problem.
Ben Bernanke
#65. The one thing people don't appreciate, I think, is that central banking is not a new development. It's been around for a very long time.
Ben Bernanke
#66. Preventing liquidation of an unbalanced market will leave you in tears.
Ben Bernanke
#67. Both humanity's capacity to innovate and the incentives to innovate are greater today than at any other time in history.
Ben Bernanke
#68. If I am confirmed, I am confident that my colleagues on the Federal Open Market Committee and I will maintain the focus on long-term price stability as monetary policy's greatest contribution to general economic prosperity and maximum employment.
Ben Bernanke
#69. Deflation is defined as a general decline in prices, with emphasis on the word 'general.'
Ben Bernanke
#70. Sector-specific price declines, uncomfortable as they may be for producers in that sector, are generally not a problem for the economy as a whole and do not constitute deflation.
Ben Bernanke
#71. Education - lifelong education for everyone - from toddlers to workers well advanced in their careers - is indeed an excellent investment for individuals and society as a whole.
Ben Bernanke
#72. Since World War II, inflation - the apparently inexorable rise in the prices of goods and services - has been the bane of central bankers.
Ben Bernanke
#73. If bankers become overly conservative in response to past lending mistakes - or if examiners force such behavior - it will hurt bankers' own long-term interests and the economy in general.
Ben Bernanke
#74. I don't know why there aren't more Depression buffs.
Ben Bernanke
#75. Remember that physical beauty is evolution's way of assuring us that the other person doesn't have too many intestinal parasites.
Ben Bernanke
#76. September and October of 2008 was the worst financial crisis in global history, including the Great Depression,
Ben Bernanke
#77. Long-term unemployment is particularly costly to those directly affected, of course. But in addition, because of its negative effects on workers' skills and attachment to the labor force, long-term unemployment may ultimately reduce the productive capacity of our economy.
Ben Bernanke
#78. All the Federal Reserve can do is make loans against collateral.
Ben Bernanke
#79. Many savers are also homeowners; indeed, a family's home may be its most important financial asset. Many savers are working, or would like to be.
Ben Bernanke
#80. We've never had a decline in house prices on a nationwide basis. So, what I think what is more likely is that house prices will slow, maybe stabilize, might slow consumption spending a bit. I don't think it's going to drive the economy too far from its full employment path, though.
Ben Bernanke
#81. Low and stable inflation in many countries is an important accomplishment that will continue to bring significant benefits.
Ben Bernanke
#82. Well, optimism's a good thing. It - makes people go out and - you know, start businesses and spend and do whatever is necessary to get the economy going.
Ben Bernanke
#83. A.I.G. was even larger than Lehman, with a substantial presence in derivatives and debt markets, as well as in insurance markets.
Ben Bernanke
#84. After the 1929 crash, the Federal Reserve mistakenly focused its policies on preserving the gold value of the dollar rather than on stabilizing the domestic economy.
Ben Bernanke
#85. If you want to understand geology, study earthquakes. If you want to understand the economy, study the Depression.
Ben Bernanke
#86. The tax code is very inefficient. Both the personal tax code and the corporate tax code. By closing loopholes and lowering rates, you could increase the efficiency of the tax code and create more incentives for people to invest.
Ben Bernanke
#87. Income inequality is troubling because, among other things, it means that many people in our society don't have the opportunities to advance themselves.
Ben Bernanke
#88. Identity theft is a serious crime that affects millions of Americans each year.
Ben Bernanke
#89. Long term, I have a lot of confidence in the United States. We have an excellent record in terms of innovation. We have great universities that are involved in technological change and progress. We have an entrepreneurial culture, much more than almost any other country.
Ben Bernanke
#90. Investment banks manage to go bankrupt through their investment-banking activities, commercial banks manage to go bankrupt through their commercial-banking activities.
Ben Bernanke
#91. I think one of the lessons of the Depression - and this is something that Franklin Roosevelt demonstrated - was that when orthodoxy fails, then you need to try new things. And he was very willing to try unorthodox approaches when the orthodox approach had shown that it was not adequate.
Ben Bernanke
#92. If you are not happy with yourself, even the loftiest achievements won't bring you much satisfaction.
Ben Bernanke
#93. Importantly, in the 1930s, in the Great Depression, the Federal Reserve, despite its mandate, was quite passive and, as a result, financial crisis became very severe, lasted essentially from 1929 to 1933.
Ben Bernanke
#94. In the future, financial firms of any type whose failure would pose a systemic risk must accept especially close regulatory scrutiny of their risk-taking.
Ben Bernanke
#96. The best approach here if at all possible is to use supervisory and regulatory methods to restrain undue risk-taking and to make sure the system is resilient in case an asset price bubble bursts in the future.
Ben Bernanke
#97. Economics is a very difficult subject. I've compared it to trying to learn how to repair a car when the engine is running.
Ben Bernanke
#98. Obviously, I haven't succeeded in defusing the political concerns about the Fed.
Ben Bernanke
#99. Following an extended boom in housing, the demand for homes began to weaken in mid-2005. By the middle of 2006, sales of both new and existing homes had fallen about 15 percent below their peak levels. Homebuilders responded to the fall in demand by sharply curtailing construction.
Ben Bernanke
#100. Nobody likes to fail but failure is an essential part of life and of learning. If your uniform isn't dirty, you haven't been in the game.
Ben Bernanke
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