George Soros Quotes

President Obama has a good sense not just of the economic requisites for financial crisis firefighting but also how you build political support for moving forward on reforming the financial system, making sure that the banks are carrying enough capital.

The details of what the Fed did were kept secret until a provision in the Dodd-Frank Act that I sponsored required the Government Accountability Office to audit the Fed's lending programs during the financial crisis.

The Fed is the major U.S. firefighter. It's not the Treasury. It's not the Congress. We certainly saw that vividly in 2008.

The Federal Reserve, the Treasury, all the regulator agencies - if there's a problem of the financial mechanism in society, the only one to fix it is government. They've got a legitimate role.

The very existence the Federal Reserve System is a safeguard against anything like a calamity growing out of money rates …. We have the power to deal with such an emergency instantly by flooding the street with money.

The Global Financial Crisis and Great Recession posed daunting new challenges for central banks around the world and spurred innovations in the design, implementation, and communication of monetary policy.

Making economic policy isn't a popularity contest, especially when financial markets are in a panic.

Insanity has infected all the central banks of the world.

The goal of the FED, as with all central banks, is three-fold: (1) to protect the largest commercial banks from their depositors, who occasionally exercise their contractual right to withdraw currency (the ungrateful cads); (2) to control entry of newcomers into the bankers' cartel (interlopers); (3) to keep the stock market from collapsing in a panic, thereby persuading depositors to withdraw currency

We used to think that we could spend our way out of a recession…. I tell you in all candor that that opinion no longer exists.

It's important for the Fed, hard as it is, to attempt to detect asset bubbles while they're forming.

The most famous and one of the most thoroughgoing opponents of bank credit was Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson reacted to the panic of 1819 as a confirmation of his pessimistic views on banks.

Monetary policy is like juggling six balls... it is not 'interest rate up, interest rate down.' There is the exchange rate, there are long term yields, there are short term yields, there is credit growth.

You cannot take bank interest rates very sharply down: you will lose your deposit franchise.

In a financial crisis, only the Fed, as the lender of last resort, might stand between our economy and financial catastrophe. We must leave the Fed with the flexibility to provide liquidity in order to stop a financial panic.

New policy tools, which helped the Federal Reserve respond to the financial crisis and Great Recession, are likely to remain useful in dealing with future downturns.

I think Ben Bernanke and Tim Geithner shared the view that they shouldn't be in the business of bailouts, but you know, you're not in the business of bailouts until you frankly think you need to be.

Why is it so hard for the IMF and the U.S. government to understand that putting out the fire comes before fireproofing the building?

I felt that the Fed had always been the agency that picked up the pieces when there was a financial crisis, and it was invented to do exactly that.

I don't think the government needs to be frightened of the banks in the slightest.

Everyone may have some advise for the RBI. Some may advise, 'Cut your lending rates and raise the deposit rate.' How will a bank function? We take a medium term view. The bank has an 80-year-old history. I don't want to destroy it for a few decisions.

When I left the Treasury, there was a poll that showed - and I don't remember the numbers exactly right - something like 90% of the people were against TARP. It prevented a disaster, but you don't get credit for a disaster that people don't see.

Federal Reserve officials have stressed the importance of the Fed's independence. But such independence does not mean that it is immune from Congressional oversight.

Bailouts may have been more tolerable in the early 1990s when they were rare and their use for a failing bank was uncertain. That is no longer the case.

I think that I was the first MP to call for the nationalisation of Northern Rock, although that is hardly surprising because I have been calling for the nationalisation of the financial sector for 30 years or more.