PAUL A. VOLCKER

Double-digit inflation is a terrible thing - and it got up to 14 or 15 percent on a monthly basis for a while, shortly after I became chairman of the Fed.

Less emphasis on inventories, I think, may tend to dampen business cycles, because business cycles are typically in the grasp of inventory cycles and heavy industry cycles.

When people begin anticipating inflation, it doesn't do you any good anymore, because any benefit of inflation comes from the fact that you do better than you thought you were going to do.

By the time I became chairman and there was more of a feeling of urgency, there was a willingness to accept more forceful measures to try to deal with the inflation.

The speed of communication, the speed of information transfer, the cheapness of communication, the ease of moving things around the world are a difference in kind as well as degree.

I am suspicious of the idea of a new paradigm, to use that word, an entirely new structure of the economy.

You could not buy a house in those days without just assuming that the house was not only a place to live, but it was a good investment, because it was going to keep up with inflation or get ahead of inflation, and it was just - that was America.

It was the biggest inflation and the most sustained inflation that the United States had ever had.

What's the subject of life - to get rich? All of those fellows out there getting rich could be dancing around the real subject of life.

Well, by the standards of a lot of countries, by Latin American standards, it wasn't so bad.

The pork part of the budget is reaching new highs.

We have little of no inflation in manufacturing goods because more and more we buy products from abroad at very cheap prices.

We are spending a little more than we are raising each year and you wonder how long it can go on. It is too easy for us to borrow.

We have an imbalance over how much we produce relative to how much we consume.

People forget how difficult it is to stop inflation or get it under control… I worry about it all the time.

People tend to buy dollars when there is a political disturbance elsewhere in the world.

Delays in or avoidance of decision making was chronic.

If you appoint me, I will raise interest rates and choke off the inflation, and that will have bad political repercussions for you.

Fanny Mae was torn between its two duties: to make as much money as they could and to protect the mortgage market.

The markets were run by mathematicians and their models but they had no business sense.

Unfortunately, we have lost our manufacturing capacity.

Knowing something and acting on that knowledge in a political setting are two different things…. Finally the markets come and hit you over the head.

We want free markets, but the markets are not going to take care of themselves in all cases.

If I knew the answer to that question, I would disclose it.

Regulators are very heavily lobbied and they tend to give in…. We must have strong, vigilant, regulators.