John Maynard Keynes Quotes

Economists have predicted seven of the last two recessions.

Between 1857 and 1929, while regulators largely stood idle, the American economy swung through 19 national boom-and-bust gyrations that sometimes threatened to wipe out whole industries within months.

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

The term 'business cycle' is imprecise. Economic fluctuations affect everyone, not just businesses, and they are, unlike astral cycles, anything but regular.

I'm not an economist and we all know economists were created to make weather forecasters look good.

There are two kinds of economists in the world. Those who don't know the future and those who don't know that they don't know the future.

The bull market, rising prices, earning lots of money, make it seem as if the good days will never end. When prices are falling and there is a recession, that also feels as though it will last for ever. Politics is the same. People simply can't imagine changing circumstances.

The euphoria around economic booms often obscures the possibility for a bust, which explains why leaders typically miss the warning signs.

An economist is an expert who will know tomorrow why the things he predicted yesterday didn't happen today.

There's a loss of faith in the banking system that for so long has been the backbone of prosperity and growth.

No one can forecast the economy with certainty.

The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable.

It’s very difficult to find out what’s going on in the economy even when its happening.

An economist is an expert who will know tomorrow why the outcome he predicted yesterday did not happen today.

There may be a recession in stock prices, but not anything in the nature of a crash..

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

There is one policy for recession or depression and another for good times.

We have professional economists who can defend any viewpoint with statistics and they do that everywhere in the world.

There is only one difference between a bad economist and a good one: the bad economist confines himself to the visible effect; the good economist takes into account both the effect that can be seen and those effects that must be foreseen.

The economic repercussions of a stock market crash depend less on the severity of the crash itself than on the response of economic policymakers, particularly central bankers.

When you have a perfect free market, it's difficult to predict the future. But when you have a market that is disturbed by government manipulations and money-printing, it's impossible to make any predictions.

There is a basic lesson on financial crises that governments tend to wait too long, underestimate the risks, want to do too little. And it ultimately gets away from them, and they end up spending more money, causing much more damage to the economy.

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.

Years ago, I noticed one thing about economics, and that is that economists didn't get anything right.

When you cover the economy as a reporter, there's one part of the job that is always easy: finding economists who disagree.