Ben Bernanke Quotes

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

The Nasdaq bubble and crash were followed by the real estate bubble then subprime crash, which led to the unprecedented printing of trillions of dollars in an attempt to prevent a global depression.

I have 13 bankers in my office, and they say that if you go forward with this you will cause the worst financial crisis since World War II.

The real problem is deflation. That is the opposite of inflation but equally serious to the borrower.

The stress on the financial system in the fall of 2007 was significant, but not so significant as to threaten the overall stability of the U.S. economy, although it did lead to the beginning of a recession at the end of 2007.

Total borrowing has imploded. Private borrowing has collapsed. And, in effect, the Treasury Department is the last borrower left standing.

It is hard to be enthusiastic about the economy's prospects when house prices are falling: Households spend less, small business owners can't use homes as collateral for loans and local governments are forced to cut jobs and programs as property-tax revenue disappears.

It's true that monetary policy was too lax for too long, and the government encouraged lending to people who were unlikely to repay their loans.

Should that worse scenario materialize, then most probably our propensity to increase interest rates will be weaker.

The world is still in deleveraging.

The bankers of the country are more to blame than are any other group for the present depression.

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

We spend too much, we borrow too much, and we distort the markets. The bigger the distortions have lasted, the bigger the bust will be.

If the Fed is omniscient, why didn't they pull back on the excess money supply that inflated the massive housing bubble that popped so disastrously back in 2008?

It's almost 10 years since the 2008 crisis, but we all still remember the consequences of ignoring threats to the public finances.

Britain was set to repeat the boom-bust cycle that led to 15 per cent. interest rates for one whole year in the early 1990s.

Fiscal crises often turn into financial crises, dealing a blow to the real economy.

The failure of Lehman Brothers demonstrated that liquidity provision by the Federal Reserve would not be sufficient to stop the crisis; substantial fiscal resources were necessary.

To the extent that bank panics interfere with normal flows of credit, they may affect the performance of the real economy.

The banking collapse was caused, more than anything, by bad government policy and the total failure of bad regulation, rather than by greed.

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.

It took us years to get into the mess that we got ourselves in at the end of 2008, and it's going to take a while to get us out. We lost eight million jobs, we saw a financial system near collapse, we have a continuing housing crisis that we're making progress on dealing with.

Inflation is not always the main problem, or indeed a problem at all. Sometimes, though rarely, deflation is a more serious threat, and we need to shelve many of the orthodoxies we have held so dear.

Financial crises are an unfortunate but necessary consequence of modern capitalism.

People stop buying things, and that is how you turn a slowdown into a recession.