Virginia Postrel Quotes

As homeowners see the value of their homes decline, they become more likely to delay purchases of the big items - like automobiles, electronics and home appliances - that are ballasts of the American economy. When those purchases decline, large manufacturing firms, suddenly short on funds, could begin laying off employees.

The Mexican debt crisis, Latin American debt crisis, the crises of the 1990s, the Wall Street stock market crash, and other events should have reminded us, and did remind us, that financial instability remains a concern, remains a problem.

History has not dealt kindly with the aftermath of protracted periods of low risk premiums.

The stock market crash in October 1929 didn't destroy a particularly large amount of wealth or make people highly pessimistic. Rather, it made companies and consumers very unsure about future income, and so led them to stop spending as they waited for more information.

We have fluctuations all the time, business cycles, and they come about in various ways, but normally what sets them off is some reduction in the willingness of our population, our businesses, and foreigners to buy.

After the First World War the economic problem was no longer one of production. It was the problem of finding markets to get the output of industry and agriculture dispersed and consumed.

The Great Depression, like most other periods of severe unemployment, was produced by government mismanagement rather than by any inherent instability of the private economy.

The year 2008 was a reminder to those who had forgotten that there is such a thing as history and that the cycle of famine and feast in commerce, first identified in antiquity and well understood in the Middle Ages, was not suddenly abolished in modern times.

Clearly, high energy prices will have a large negative effect on the California economy and could possibly drag the rest of the nation into a recession.

Keynesian modelling relies on marginal propensity to consume and marginal propensity to invest. The idea that if we give more money to the poor, they have a propensity to consume that's much higher than the wealthy, though I wish they would talk to my wife about that; she seems to have a propensity to consume.

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.

If we continue to print new paychecks at the rate we've been adding them, that mitigates a lot of the damage of higher gasoline prices.

Something effectual must be done to revive the languishing commerce and manufacturing industry of this country ... We must make this country a cheap country for living.

People say, 'Well you know the economy's bad, so China consumption will be low. No, totally different. You Americans love to spend tomorrow's money, and other people's money maybe... We Chinese love to save money.

Some kind of correction will always happen. But it depends on the specific companies.

The way you create deflation is you create an asset bubble.

Every serious deflation I've looked at is preceded by an asset bubble, and then it bursts.

Ups and downs are par for the course and very much a feature of the Indian growth process.

You don't drive an economy by consuming - the consumer is not the engine, the consumer is the caboose.

When it gets into these spikes, with shortages and uproar and so forth, people go bananas, but that's capitalism.

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.

You don't boost growth by cutting taxes, you do that by giving money to people.

The lack of a consistent policy from major economies is the main source of volatility.

When the economy is strong, people tend to buy three things from the top of their wish list. But when things are bad, people often buy only the first thing on their list.

I don't see how a lowering of VAT helps much, in terms of stimulus. VAT is a form of sales tax. It gets paid when you spend. A stimulus should put money in your pocket before you have actually spent the money.