Top 100 Inflation's Quotes
#1. Perhaps the most important reason to be skeptical of government inflation numbers is that the government, like a fox campaigning to guard a hen house, has many reasons to be disingenuous. As the world's largest debtor, the Federal Government is inflation's primary beneficiary.
Peter Schiff
#2. It has now been over 7 years since Congress last raised the minimum wage to its current level of $5.15 per hour. Since that last increase, Congress's failure to adjust the wage for inflation has reduced the purchasing power of the minimum wage to record low levels.
Jon Corzine
#3. In 1953, at the beginning of the Eisenhower era and the glory years of the auto industry, Hudson's had done $153 million in retail sales; in 1981 the downtown Hudson's had done only $44 million - a figure, if adjusted for inflation, about 6 percent of the 1953 total.
David Halberstam
#4. Inflation is not a benign element in the economy's operation. It is, as it has always been, the most dangerous and destructive form of taxation.
Robert Higgs
#5. What I'm trying to say is that for the average investor, what I would encourage them to do is to understand that there's inflation and growth. It can go higher and lower and to have four different portfolios essentially that make up your entire portfolio that gets you balanced.
Ray Dalio
#6. The essence of any plan for financing old age is saving-to put aside some part of today's earnings for the future. Anything that saps the value of savings-and inflation is the worst single threat-is the enemy of the aged and of those who expect to grow old.
Bernard Baruch
#7. With the shrinking of the US economy, and it's shrinking very rapidly, you not only have more money, but you also have fewer goods. That's a classic double-whammy on inflation.
Arthur Laffer
#8. There are specific identifiers that are entirely recognizable during the bubble's inflation. One hallmark of mania is the rapid rise in the incidence and complexity of fraud ... .
Michael Lewis
#9. Life in the fast lane," Michael's reply. "You have to adjust for inflation.
Jennifer Lynn Barnes
#10. My bottom line is that monetary policy should react to rising prices for houses or other assets only insofar as they affect the central bank's goal variables - output, employment, and inflation.
Janet Yellen
#11. See your disappointments as good fortune. One plan's deflation is another's inflation.
Jean Cocteau
#12. After a long period in which the desired direction for inflation was always downward, the industrialized world's central banks must today try to avoid major changes in the inflation rate in either direction.
Ben Bernanke
#13. We will not play with inflation. We are living a delicate moment. President Obama spoke to me today about the high unemployment affecting the United States. In this crisis period, when the developed nations are not recovering, it's prudent to maintain the established inflation target.
Dilma Rousseff
#14. In the simplest terms, inflation occurs when there's too much money in the system. On the flip side, deflation occurs when there are too few dollars in circulation.
Robert Kiyosaki
#15. It's clear that the true problems of our Nation are much deeper - deeper than gasoline lines of energy shortages, deeper even than inflation or recession. And I realize more than ever that as President I need your help. So, I decided to reach out and listen to the voices of America.
Jimmy Carter
#16. If grade inflation continues, a college bachelor's degree will have just as much credibility as a high school diploma.
Walter E. Williams
#17. There are a lot of people missing in Iraq. Just the other day I heard of somebody asking $250,000 ransom for an Egyptian. Can you imagine? An Egyptian. That's inflation. This war," he said, leaning closer to her, "is all about money.
Leslie Cockburn
#18. But clearly an economy that's growing and expanding like this one - and it certainly is doing that with high GDP output, employment numbers strong, capacity utilization strong - that's an environment in which the Fed needs to continually be alert to early signs of inflation.
John W. Snow
#19. However, this President sees no problem eliminating funding for Perkins Loans in his budget, even though the cost of tuition is rising and will continue to rise as the administration's policies force inflation.
Tim Bishop
#20. It's not about the pace, it's about the direction we've set. The pace is of course a function of many factors, including the magnitude of the supply shock. But what's probably more important is the probability of the supply shock translating into sustainable embedded inflation.
Marek Belka
#21. I'm a walking economy. My hairline's in recession,my waist is a victim of inflation, and together they're putting me in a deep depression!
Anonymous
#22. Being a critic is easy.
But if the critic tries to run the operation, he soon understands that nothing is as easy as his criticisms.
Criticism without a solution is merely an inflation of the critic's ego.
Haemin Sunim
#23. I forgot my purse of laughter when I dressed this mornin'," she told me. "Have you not bought anythin' the last few days? Prices have gone up. Pay or starve, it's all one to me.
Tamora Pierce
#24. Life is full of joys and sorrows, much of it our own making. Sadly, the West has voted time and time again for bigger government, more inflation, higher taxes and excessive regulation - all policies that have kept us from Adam Smith's vision of an opulent society.
Mark Skousen
#25. Inflation is like toothpaste. Once it's out, you can hardly get it back in again.
Karl Otto Pohl
#26. The reason I am so negative about the Federal Reserve's policies is that they only target core inflation and argue that they can't identify bubbles, but when each bubble bursts, they flood the system with liquidity that brings about unintended consequences.
Marc Faber
#27. If you want to slow medical inflation in the private sector, it makes sense to expand the government's investment in private health care.
Timothy Noah
#28. The principle that a central bank, charged with controlling inflation, should be independent from the government is unassailable. It may also be true that it's easier for the central bank to guard its independence from political pressure when it mainly holds government securities.
Janet Yellen
#29. Let's turn inflation over to the post office. That'll slow it down.
Mo Udall
#30. Every economist knows that minimum wages either do nothing or cause inflation and unemployment. That's not a statement, it's a definition.
Milton Friedman
#31. Penny for your thoughts,' asked Gwen.
'Cheapskate,' said Ianto. 'Never heard of inflation? Thoughts are a bit pricier than that these days.'
'OK,' said Gwen. 'A pint down the local tomorrow for your thoughts.'
Ianto smiled. 'That's more like it.
David Llewellyn
#32. Dollar depreciation leads to higher inflation and ultimately forces foreign creditors to question their rationale and indeed their sanity for continuing purchases of U.S. Treasuries.
Bill Gross
#33. There were certain elements of the human world that where out of their control: war, inflation, American Idol ... all things which could cause major irritation to a vampire's daily life.
Mimi Jean Pamfiloff
#34. 'Eternal inflation,' as it's called - the endless generation of new universes - may be a hyper-cosmic imperative. It seems that it must happen.
Seth Shostak
#35. The risk is that as we come out of this recession, we'll have so much debt to finance, we'll either have to have inflation or very high interest rates to continue to borrow the money, or both. That's a risk.
William J. Clinton
#36. Low interest rates are usually attributed to low inflation, weak economic growth and super easy monetary policy. But there's another deep-seated factor that doesn't get much attention: demographics.
Greg Ip
#37. A devious spark lit through Al, making me smile. One way. It costs too much,
he said.
"There's no inflation in the ever-after, Al."
Call it a recession then. One way.
Kim Harrison
#38. There's one thing that the Fed has been really good at cracking down on, and that's inflation.
Paul Krugman
#39. I find it funny that people who didn't think there was any inflation in the pipeline are now talking about stagflation. This is nothing like the 1970's, which was a pretty dismal period and not just because of polyester and disco.
Barry Ritholtz
#40. The well-being of the British people and the health of our economy are far more important than any government's commitment to a particular strategy, but to change course now would be fatal to the whole counter-inflation strategy.
Geoffrey Howe
#41. Of course, looking tough on inflation is part of any central banker's job description: if investors believe that inflation is going to get out of control, you end up with higher interest rates and capital flight, and a vicious circle quickly ensues.
James Surowiecki
#42. Nothing disturbs me more than the downward trend of productivity in our nation today. The consequences of a decrease in productivity are a diminished standard of living, higher labor costs, less competitive prices, and more inflation.
Robert S. Strauss
#43. Food and energy account for a significant portion of household budgets, so the Federal Reserve's inflation objective is defined in terms of the overall change in consumer prices.
Janet Yellen
#44. Mass inflation, welfare line, gross economy, trade it all for what's behind curtain number three.
Joe Walsh
#45. Bernanke and company are trying to reflate the economy with almost stated objective of inflation at 2 percent and higher in order to provide some type of safety margin for a future recession. That's where they want to go.
Bill Gross
#46. When we say "people worry" about inflation, it's mainly bondholders that worry. The labor force benefitted from the inflation of the '50s, '60s and '70s.
Michael Hudson
#47. In the '30s, the Keynesian stuff worked at least in the sense that you could print money without inflation because there was all this productivity growth happening. That's not going to work today.
Peter Thiel
#48. Buy a $100 U.S. bond and frame it to teach your children about inflation by watching the U.S. bond value diminish to almost nothing over the next 20 years.
Marc Faber
#49. Taxes on capital, taxes on labor, inflation, bureaucratic regulation, minimum wage laws, are all - to different degrees - unnecessary slices of the wedge that stand between an individual's effort and reward for that effort.
Jack Kemp
#50. It is a way to take people's wealth from them without having to openly raise taxes. Inflation is the most universal tax of all.
Thomas Sowell
#51. It has been said that the Fed's job is to take the punch bowl away just as the party gets going, raising interest rates when the economy is growing too fast and inflation threatens.
Alex Berenson
#52. Deflation isn't good, and inflation is easier to cure than deflation.
Robert Kiyosaki
#53. We should be disciplined and responsible and then our prosperity will be stable despite any economic crisis, inflation or a change of government
Sunday Adelaja
#54. Median wages of production workers, who comprise 80 percent of the workforce, haven't risen in 30 years, adjusted for inflation.
Robert Reich
#55. Ask me whether inflation represents longer-term problem. I think there's a potential there for excess reserves to create problems.
Arthur Laffer
#56. What we call "willing" is often but an inflation of ourselves, attended by a hardening.
Nilakanta Sri Ram
#57. I almost always recommend investors get fully invested, since it's better to put your money to work than to let it simply track the rate of inflation.
Louis Navellier
#58. A crucial responsibility of any central bank is to control inflation, the average rate of increase in the prices of a broad group of goods and services.
Janet Yellen
#59. With the sugar market hysteria, the people are obviously worried and expect higher inflation. When this hysteria subsides, which we're probably observing, then I hope that people will also get less worried about the future of inflation.
Marek Belka
#60. If unemployment could be brought down to say 2 percent at the cost of an assured steady rate of inflation of 10 percent per year, or even 20 percent, this would be a good bargain.
William Vickrey
#61. In the United States, after World War II, it took about two decades for the message to slowly seep in that inflation was going to be a permanent fact of the American way of life.
Murray Rothbard
#62. My decision to leave applied mathematics for economics was in part tied to the widely-held popular belief in the 1960s that macroeconomics had made fundamental inroads into controlling business cycles and stopping dysfunctional unemployment and inflation.
Robert C. Merton
#63. We gotta control inflation, quit spending our money on everything. But this years tax increase, why it's the biggest in history.
Hank Williams Jr.
#64. That our popular art forms have become so obsessed with sex has turned the U.S.A into a nation of hobbledehoys; as if grown people don't have more vital concerns, such as taxes, inflation, dirty politics, earning a living, getting an education, or keeping out of jail.
Anita Loos
#65. Rapid increases in the quantity of money produce inflation. Sharp decreases produce depression.
Milton Friedman
#66. No one should expect the value of their house to appreciate quickly - counting on your home to be a significant part of your retirement saving isn't a winning strategy - but it is reasonable to expect that prices generally will rise with at least the rate of inflation for some time to come.
Mark Zandi
#67. Uncertainty about sales impedes business planning and could harm capital formation just as much as uncertainty about inflation can create uncertainty about relative prices and harm business planning.
Janet Yellen
#68. It's good news that he is proposing to restore budget cuts that he made, but the reality is that he is still proposing a 4.5 percent increase in tuition that's above inflation.
James Rosapepe
#69. Zimbabwe is a lost country. There is no money in Zimbabwe, everything stands still. The economy of the country is in shambles, the inflation is the highest in this world.
Thomas Mapfumo
#70. In the long run wives are to be paid in a peculiar coin - consideration for their feelings. As it usually turns out this is an enormous, unthinkable inflation few men will remit, or if they will, only with a sense of being overcharged.
Elizabeth Hardwick
#71. [U]nemployment is ... a side effect of the cure for inflation.
Milton Friedman
#72. Inflation takes from the ignorant and gives to the well informed.
Venita VanCaspel
#73. To try to cure unemployment by inflation rather than by adjustment of specific wage-rates is like trying to adjust the piano to the stool rather than the stool to the piano.
Henry Hazlitt
#74. Markets need not be in sync with one another. Simultaneously, the bond market can be priced for sustained tough times, the equity market for a strong recovery, and gold for high inflation. Such an apparent disconnect is indefinitely sustainable.
Seth Klarman
#75. Inflation makes the wealthiest people richer and the masses poorer.
James Cook
#76. Since nostaglia is fueled by inflation, could it be that inflation is the result of a conspiracy by the people who are trying to palm off McGovern buttons and Howdy Doody puppets and their Aunt Thelma's toaster as antiques.
Calvin Trillin
#77. in nearly three decades, these lower-income workers saw no meaningful gain in what they were paid for an hour of labor. Their overall inflation-adjusted income rose a bit, but mainly because they put in more hours of work.
Anonymous
#78. The reality is that zero defects in products plus zero pollution plus zero risk on the job is equivalent to maximum growth of government plus zero economic growth plus runaway inflation.
Dixie Lee Ray
#79. Listening to Democrats complain about inflation is like listening to germs complain about disease.
Spiro T. Agnew
#80. Inflation is lower and more stable and the real business cycle fluctuations are more modest.
Martin Feldstein
#81. A gold standard is the ideal monetary system for those who create wealth through ingenuity, entrepreneurship, and hard work. Gold standards are disfavored by those who do not create wealth but instead seek to extract wealth from others through inflation, inside information, and market manipulation.
James Rickards
#82. The US is about to go all Billy the Kid. Inflation is going to keep shooting up.
Jarod Kintz
#83. Economic medicine that was previously meted out by the cupful has recently been dispensed by the barrel. These once unthinkable dosages will almost certainly bring on unwelcome after-effects. Their precise nature is anyone's guess, though one likely consequence is an onslaught of inflation.
Warren Buffett
#84. Inflation is when you pay fifteen dollars for the ten-dollar haircut you used to get for five dollars when you had hair.
Sam Ewing
#85. If I were in charge of the government, I would index the minimum wage to inflation, so that way, everybody knows what they can count on.
Fred DeLuca
#86. Discussions of health care in the U.S. usually focus on insurance companies, but, whatever their problems, they're not the main driver of health-care inflation: providers are.
James Surowiecki
#87. If increased government spending with borrowed or newly created money is a 'stimulus,' then the Weimar Republic should have been stimulated to unprecedented prosperity, instead of runaway inflation and widespread economic desperation that ultimately brought Adolf Hitler to power.
Thomas Sowell
#88. The price of gold was fixed at $35 an ounce in 1934, but by the time the U.S. got through the Korean War, the Vietnam war, with all the associated secular inflation, the price level had gone up nearly three times.
Robert Mundell
#89. Prolonged inflation never 'stimulates' the economy. On the contrary, it unbalances, disrupts, and misdirects production and employment.
Henry Hazlitt
#91. In the long run, the gold price has to go up in relation to paper money. There is no other way. To what price, that depends on the scale of the inflation - and we know that inflation will continue.
Nicholas Deak
#92. Inflation is the fiscal complement of statism and arbitrary government. It is a cog in the complex of policies and institutions which gradually lead toward totalitarianism .
Ludwig Von Mises
#93. We have some concerns if student financial aid is not keeping pace, and college costs continue to outstrip inflation.
Mary Johnson
#94. It was gradually learned that acceptance of a somewhat higher inflation rate would not really bring somewhat higher employment.
Edmund Phelps
#95. Investing solely for 'income,' investing merely 'to keep capital employed,' and investing simply 'to hedge against inflation' are all entirely out of the question.
Gerald M. Loeb
#97. Declining productivity and quality means your unit production costs stay high but you don't have as much to sell. Your workers don't want to be paid less, so to maintain profits, you increase your prices. That's inflation.
W. Edwards Deming
#98. Inflation outstripped real wages for people who work for pay from others.
Tim Bishop
#99. Inflation is a form of hidden taxation which it is almost impossible to measure.
John J. Beckley
#100. Every portfolio benefits from bonds; they provide a cushion when the stock market hits a rough patch. But avoiding stocks completely could mean your investment won't grow any faster than the rate of inflation.
Suze Orman
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