Sharan Burrow Quotes

I'm against having a Fed. It's socialism in its worst form. But until the Fed is gotten rid of, the only economic variable the poor have to counteract the injustices of the Fed is the minimum wage law.

All the Federal Reserve can do is make loans against collateral.

I have spoken about deficits, and I think deficits are important because they address broad economic and financial stability. We need to talk about that.

Interest rates are used to achieve overall economic stability.

You care about the deficit because it allows you to do things you need to do to help people who are suffering.

Funds are fungible .... Capital controls are extraordinarily difficult to implement and enforce.

People at the top spend less money than those at the bottom, so when you have redistribution toward the top, aggregate demand goes down. Unless you intervene, you're going to have a weak economy unless something else happens.

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.

Bad as "independence" is, the main fault of the Federal Reserve System - an admirable system if conducted in the public interest - is that too much power and control rests in the hands of people whose private interests are directly affected by the Federal Reserves' actions.

The New York Federal Reserve is a tool of the big banks.

You know policy is driven purely in self interest. The Federal Reserve Bank and the commercial banks and the Wall Street banks are not acting in the interests of the population at large, they're acting purely in their own self-interest, which is a shame because they're actions dictate the reality for 300 million Americans. But they don't see it that way, they see it only as a way to preserve their own self-interest.

Throughout the 19th century, when there was a laissez-faire mentality and insufficient regulation, you had one crisis after another. Each crisis brought about some reform. That is how central banking developed.

You can't fall back on the private sector and say, 'You take care of the nation's banking system.' That's a fundamental function of the government, the Federal Reserve, the Treasury and the FDIC, etc. All of those agencies have a major role to play there.

The Fed's ability to raise and lower short-term interest rates is its primary control over the economy.

The job of the Central Bank is to worry.

The Federal Reserve Act requires the Federal Reserve to report annually on its operations and to publish its balance sheet weekly.

The Fed is totally open.

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.

Obviously, I haven't succeeded in defusing the political concerns about the Fed.

The Fed has got to become a more democratic institution that is responsive to the needs of the middle class, not just Wall Street CEOs.

The president has very little effect on the economy. If you want to put blame or credit, the main person who influences the business cycle is the head of the Federal Reserve Bank.

The Congress has had an uneasy relationship with banks and bankers since Alexander Hamilton. It took the United States until 1913 to set up a central bank. The Federal Reserve earned its hard-won independence over years of effort.

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.

There is a big divergence between views on a variety of policy issues from fiscal stimulus to financial regulation. It's my hope and my ambition for the economics profession that as we advance our knowledge, that those discussions will narrow in their focus, and that it will help to have more prudent policy-making down the road.

'Inequality' has become the political theme/slogan of our time in both Europe and the U.S., yet political leaders do not even bother to consider that their own policies, which put the entire burden on central bankers to print money and drive up stock, bond and other asset prices, are actually exacerbating income and wealth disparity.