Eugene Fama Quotes

I think if there's a great depression there might be some hope.

To my mind, the main reason for the Depression in the United States as a whole, is the bondage of debt and the spirit of speculation among the people.

Not every business cycle has a financial crisis. Frequently they do.

Economists are very good at saying that something cannot go on forever, but not so good at saying when it will stop.

This crash is not going to have much effect on business.

We have depressions about every 10-20 years—just long enough for the current generation to forget the last depression.

My job was to teach the whole corpus of economic theory, but there were two subjects in which I was especially interested, namely, the economics of mass unemployment and international economics.

Importantly, in the 1930s, in the Great Depression, the Federal Reserve, despite its mandate, was quite passive and, as a result, financial crisis became very severe, lasted essentially from 1929 to 1933.

But despite historic levels of obstruction, President Obama was able to bring the economy back from the verge of a second Great Depression.

The downturn following the collapse of Japan's so-called bubble economy of the 1980s was not as severe as the Great Depression.

It took capitalism half a century to come back from the Great Depression.

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.

Economics has many substantive areas of knowledge where there is agreement, but also contains areas of controversy. That's inescapable.

We are having the single worst recovery the U.S. has had since the Great Depression. I don't care how you measure it. The East Coast knows it. The West Coast knows it. North, South, old, young, everyone knows it's the worst recovery since the Great Depression.

Facts are facts: No president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the Great Depression inherited a worse economy, bigger job losses or deeper problems from his predecessor. But President Obama is moving America forward, not back.

Unemployment is sky-rocketing; deflation is in our future for the first time since the Great Depression. I don't care whose fault it is, it's the truth.

The '20s ended in an era of extravagance, sort of like the one we're in now. There was a big crash, but then the country picked itself up again, and we had some great years. Those were the days when American believed in itself. I was happy and proud to be painting it.

Discussions of the economy, especially during times of crisis, are often framed in terms of lessons we supposedly learned during the Depression of the 1930s. If we are not to endure terrible times like those again, we are told, we must support whatever form of state intervention is currently being peddled.

When the economy shows signs of faltering, prompt countermoves are required. Even mild measures on the part of government can be effective in the early stages of an economic decline. ... If action is withheld until a recession has gained momentum, strong and costly measures may prove insufficient.

To reduce inequality, employment must be sustained by appropriate macroeconomic policy.

We now have the worst of both worlds – not just inflation on the one side or stagnation on the other side, but both of them together. We have sort of “stagflation” situation.

No country can violate the laws of economic gravity too long.

There's no such thing as a painless cure for inflation.

Before the stock market crash of 1929 approximately half of all the stock sold in America was fraudulent. President Coolidge did not believe in the Federal Government interfering with business and would not interfere. His Secretary of Commerce, Herbert Hoover however was worried about the extreme corruption of the system. By the time he succeeded Coolidge as President, it was too late.

The problem now is to shape our policy so as to avoid a calamitous break in the stock market … and at the same time accomplish if possible, the recovery of Europe.