Harry Reid Quotes

This economy is not getting better and the president's policies are the reason.

The simple fact of the matter is, as I know everyone in this room knows, that the recession that this country faced when this President took office was the worst since the Great Depression.

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.

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.

History proves... that a smart central bank can protect the economy and the financial sector from the nastier side effects of a stock market collapse.

The reality for us in America is that we will never get out of debt with more than 15 million people out of work.

Even if consumer confidence hit rock bottom, that most likely would not be enough, by itself, to cause a depression.

Of course, presidents are always blamed or rewarded for the state of the economy.

When you look what is happening in this country with the debt, the deficit, the CBO coming out and saying once again we're going to have a trillion dollar plus deficit in 2012, the fourth straight year, and unemployment may be going back up to 8.9 or maybe nine percent by the end of the year, these are serious situations that are going.

… a depression is for capitalism like a good, cold douche.

During an economic crisis, what matters is that the government keeps its foot on the accelerator.

Herbert Hoover failed through no fault of his own. The Crash of 1929 and the Great Depression were beyond his control, and every remedy he tried failed adequately to work.

When inflation begins to rise, that's a situation we know how to deal with. When the economy is not doing well, and we're stuck at zero, that's one we don't know so much about - or we know about it that it's bad.

You have to take it seriously that the economy is in crisis.

During the slow recovery after the Great Recession, inflation was very low, and it took us a while to get it back moving up.

If we did go into a recession, something that's always possible for the U.S. or Europe, we could lower interest rates and expand the money supply without worrying about the price of gold.

I'm just opposed to a pure inflation-only mandate in which the only thing a central bank cares about is inflation and not employment.

We believe that - the President believes that the economy will continue to grow, that the economy will continue to create jobs, and that we need to do everything we can to enhance that growth and enhance that job creation.

It was gradually learned that acceptance of a somewhat higher inflation rate would not really bring somewhat higher employment.

If unemployment could be brought down to say 2 percent at the cost of an assured steady rate of inflation of 10 percent per year, or even 20 percent, this would be a good bargain.

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.

We got into a recession because the global economy went into the recession and we're a big exporting nation.

The entire economy, of course, is locked in a down cycle right now. Last time we weathered this was during another Bush presidency in '90. We were locked in it for a year and a half and everyone came out of it.

I mean, the reality is unemployment today - over 14 million Americans are unemployed. That's exactly what it was a year ago. I mean, this - the American people know we can't borrow and spend and bail our way back to a growing economy.