Will Rogers Quotes

No president has ever been elected with unemployment over 8 percent.

At best, in such depression times, monetary policy is a feeble reed on which to lean.

If you look at what happened, I came in the middle of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. And unlike Franklin Delano Roosevelt who waited, well, didn't take office until about three years into the Great Depression, it was happening just as I was elected.

What the Depression teaches us is that when the economy is so depressed that even a zero interest rate isn't low enough, you have to put conventional notions of prudence and sound policy aside.

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.

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

It's Obama's bad luck that he got elected just as the mayhem of the foreclosures, the banking collapse, and the General Motors disaster was accelerating the surge in unemployment to warp speed.

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.

2008 was to the American economy what 9/11 was to national security. Yet while 9/11 prompted the U.S. government to tear up half the Constitution in the name of public safety, after 2008, authorities went in the other direction.

Long periods of recession, which tend to be self-perpetuating, are usually ended by war, or by preparations for it.

I started out in public service in 1998 after the Asian financial crisis of '97.

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.

History shows that tax increases during a recession are a recipe for greater unemployment and economic loss.

We're still in a recession. We're not gonna be out of it for a while, but we will get out.

A troubled economy is always the sitting president's fault. It was when Ronald Reagan defeated Jimmy Carter, when Bill Clinton defeated George H.W. Bush, and when Barack Obama defeated John McCain by running against George W. Bush.

And if you like 14.4 percent unemployment, if you like the fact that 70 percent of home mortgages in Nevada are underwater, then stay the course. Vote for Harry Reid.

Canadians know that the promise of a recession didn't happen because of anything we did here. If you look at all the causes of the recession, problems in mortgage markets, the problems in the banking sector, the problems in government finance in countries like Greece, none of those problems were in present Canada.

I think that this is the most significant financial crisis in the post-War period for the United States, and it has in fact a global reach.... I think it is extraordinarily important to understand that, as we have seen in many previous examples of different countries and different times, choking up of credit is like taking the lifeblood away from the economy.

When the economy gets wobbly, people pay attention to the leadership failures.

The economic meltdown that would define every aspect of Obama's economy came to a head well before he became president, of course, and so did the legislation that would be the basis for everything that came after.

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

There is no question that the recovery from the global recession triggered by the 2008 financial crisis has been unusually lengthy and anemic.

I think it is true that, post the global financial crisis initially - and for some period after that and particularly with how the mining investment boom and commodity prices played out - there was a dislocation that occurred in some of the more traditional mechanisms.

We simply can't spend our way out of a recession.

It is the policies of the Obama Administration that has led to a stagnated economy as well as high unemployment, as well as many of the other issues that we face.