Steve Hanke Quotes

#1. Following its recognition as a state in 1832, Greece spent most of the remainder of the 19th century under the control of creditors. The pattern started with a default in 1832. In consequence, Greece's finances were put under French administration.

Steve Hanke

#2. When I was operating as one of President Reagan's economic advisers, an early assignment was to analyze the federal government's landholdings and make recommendations about what to do with them. This was a big job. These lands are vast, covering an area six times that of France.

Steve Hanke

#3. Sanctions historically are quite counterproductive in the sense that if you impose sanctions on your enemy, it tends to strengthen your enemy.

Steve Hanke

#4. Since China embraced Deng Xiaoping's reforms on 22 December 1978, China has experimented with different exchange-rate regimes. Until 1994, the yuan was in an ever-depreciating phase against the U.S. dollar.

Steve Hanke

#5. High mandated minimum wages will throw people out of work and onto the welfare rolls in cases where unemployment benefits exist. When it comes to welfare payments, they obey the laws of economics, too. Indeed, if something - like unemployment - is subsidized, more of it will be produced.

Steve Hanke

#6. A minimum wage leads to higher levels of unemployment.

Steve Hanke

#7. The IMF is set up to deal with liquidity crises.

Steve Hanke

#8. Although floating and fixed rates appear dissimilar, they are members of the same freemarket family. Both operate without exchange controls and are free-market mechanisms for balance-of-payment adjustments.

Steve Hanke

#9. In January 2013, one could buy a Bitcoin for about $13. By late November, one Bitcoin would have set a buyer back over $1100.

Steve Hanke

#10. There is always the potential for a central bank to engage in discretionary monetary policy and to break the one-to-one link between changes in foreign reserves and changes in the money supply.

Steve Hanke

#11. With the passing of Milton Friedman on November 16, 2006, we lost one of the great champions of free markets.

Steve Hanke

#12. Most economists use 'fixed' and 'pegged' as interchangeable or nearly interchangeable terms for exchange rates.

Steve Hanke

#13. After the maxi yuan depreciation of 1994 and until 2005, exchange-rate fixity was the order of the day, with little movement in the CNY/USD rate.

Steve Hanke

#14. In Argentina, if the weather is bad, critics will blame it on the currency board.

Steve Hanke

#15. There has never been a failure of a currency board anywhere in the world. These are tough systems, and when I say they are foolproof, that's exactly the case.

Steve Hanke

#16. In April 2013, Nathaniel Popper of 'The New York Times' reported on Bitcoin in an article titled, 'Digital Money is Gaining Champions in the Real World'.

Steve Hanke

#17. Contrary to what most people think, bank money is much more important than state money. In Greece, for example, bank money makes up 84.26% of the total money supply.

Steve Hanke

#18. In 2008, Bitcoin was mysteriously introduced to the world in an obscure, technical paper written under the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto. By late 2013, the financial press was filled with reportage on Bitcoin and its dramatic price increase.

Steve Hanke

#19. If you squeeze and squeeze, and you don't allow the Iranians to sell any oil, then what do they have to lose by shutting the Strait of Hormuz down? And if they do that, that's 35% of all the world's oil that comes through the strait and 20% of the liquefied natural gas in the world.

Steve Hanke

#20. When Ronald Reagan was elected president for his first term in 1980, he received strong support from the so-called Sagebrush Rebels. The Rebels wanted lands owned by the federal government to be transferred to state governments.

Steve Hanke

#21. The most important lesson to take away from allowing the minimum wage and unemployment benefit data to talk is that abstract notions of what is right, good and just should be examined from a concrete, operational point of view. A dose of reality is most edifying.

Steve Hanke