Fred Ehrsam Quotes

The United States can pay any debt it has because we can always print money to do that. So there is zero probability of default.

Well, I think as long as people are talking about stimulus, I think the Fed will be thinking about cutting rates because monetary policy is the better way to go because you can turn it on and turn it off.

The Fed [Federal Reserve System], whether it likes it or not, is required to provide adequate reserves to the banking system in order for the government to finance its needs, even when that is inflationary.

Experience shows that high and unstable inflation can harm growth. A noninflationary macroeconomic policy is, therefore, a prerequisite for rapid development. Control of government borrowing is the crucial element in such a policy. When public borrowing is excessive, governments are soon obliged to finance it by printing money, and rising inflation then follows.

No one single thing that we do will control inflation

Of course I welcome all the normalization of monetary policy. I think monetary policy should be normal.

There is no risk-free path for monetary policy.

When you have steady inflows and global central banks hell-bent on stoking credit activity and inflation, money will flow into the most attractive areas.

For people who grew up in the last four decades of the 20th century, it is hard to grasp the concept of negative interest rates. How is it even possible? If interest rates are the price of money, is the marketplace broadcasting that money is on sale? Are we just giving it away?

Printing money creates inflation, which weakens an economy. Unfortunately, this kind of common-sense thinking never seems to penetrate academic circles.

After a long period in which the desired direction for inflation was always downward, the industrialized world's central banks must today try to avoid major changes in the inflation rate in either direction.

However, in spite of the general perception that monetary policy should be conducted so as to avert deflation, a central bank cannot lower interest rates below the zero lower bound.

By the time I became chairman and there was more of a feeling of urgency, there was a willingness to accept more forceful measures to try to deal with the inflation.

If I am confirmed, I am confident that my colleagues on the Federal Open Market Committee and I will maintain the focus on long-term price stability as monetary policy's greatest contribution to general economic prosperity and maximum employment.

A good monetary policy follows inflationary expectations and not historical numbers.

In 1977, when I started my first job at the Federal Reserve Board as a staff economist in the Division of International Finance, it was an article of faith in central banking that secrecy about monetary policy decisions was the best policy: Central banks, as a rule, did not discuss these decisions, let alone their future policy intentions.

The phrase 'perception is reality' is overused generally. But perception can be reality in monetary policy. The bond market doesn't act merely on what it sees. It acts on what it expects of the Fed or the government.

Thirty years ago, many economists argued that inflation was a kind of minor inconvenience and that the cost of reducing inflation was too high a price to pay. No one would make those arguments today.

The central focus of what we are doing at the Fed is to keep inflation from accelerating - and preferably decelerating.

In the 1960s, and stretching back to the 1930s, it was felt by many economists that easy money is a reliable way to increase employment.

It's pointless to talk to Fed members about economics because they are academics who believe in money-printing. Some of them believe they didn't print enough, and so with these kinds of people, it is like running to the pope. What do you want to tell them?

Any debate among politicians about monetary policy is counterproductive.

I never liked quantitative easing. It's misunderstood by almost everybody. Flattening the yield curve is not stimulative; flattening the yield curve is anti-stimulative.

Each money-printing exercise brings about unintended consequences. These unintended consequences are higher inflation rates than had no money been printed.

In a world where wealth is growing, you can get away with printing money. Doubling the debt over the next 20 years is not a problem.