Jeffrey Sachs Quotes

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.

In the '30s, the Keynesian stuff worked at least in the sense that you could print money without inflation because there was all this productivity growth happening. That's not going to work today.

The Fed has the ability to put money out, it's got the ability to take money back in, and if they don't do that, we will have hyperinflation worse than we had in 1980 and 1981.

I think the Fed is not designed to have effective tools to deal with the economy. It should settle for just controlling the money supply. And - if it insists, it can worry about inflation.

The Federal Reserve bank buys government bonds without one penny

The worst failures of the Federal Reserve have come from waiting too long tp tighten monetary policy during expansions, not from loosening it too much during recessions.

There are long lags between the start of a downturn and the potential launch of an effective fiscal stimulus.

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.

Aggressive government spending during the Great Recession was absolutely necessary.

If Congress wanted to intervene with the Federal Reserve, well, we created the Federal Reserve. We could uncreate it. But would you want Congress regulating the money supply? We'd have drowned in inflation, or gone bankrupt, decades ago.

To protect people's lives and keep our children safe, we must implement public-works spending and do so proudly. If possible, I'd like to see the Bank of Japan purchase all of the construction bonds that we need to issue to cover the cost. That would also forcefully circulate money in the market. That would be positive for the economy, too.

If there's a severe recession, the automatic stabilizers will come into effect, and we will still try to reduce the structural deficit, but we will not try to keep cutting the budget so that we keep worsening a severe recession.

Monetary policy has less room to maneuver when interest rates are close to zero, while expansionary fiscal policy is likely both more effective and less costly in terms of increased debt burden when interest rates are pinned at low levels.

I don't know of any President, now or in the past, who does not favor lower interest rates. That's the American way.

The Federal Reserve Act as it stands seems to me to open the way to a vast inflation of the currency... I do not like to think that any law can be passed that will make it possible to submerge the gold standard in a flood of irredeemable paper currency.

Our Federal Reserve has unlimited money raising powers.

A national government has to be able to spend money in a recession to make up for the private money that is not being spent.

Every time the Fed implements 'quantitative easing,' a.k.a. printing more money, two things go up: taxes and inflation. When taxes and inflation go up, more jobs are lost.

Below-target inflation increases the real value of debts owed by households and businesses and reduces the ability of central banks to respond to downturns.

The financial crisis and the Great Recession posed the most significant macroeconomic challenges for the United States in a half-century, leaving behind high unemployment and below-target inflation and calling for highly accommodative monetary policies.

Forget quantitative easing - I've always thought the idea of injecting virtual money into the system is an accident waiting to happen.

The Fed has one power that is unique to it alone: it enables the creation of money out of thin air. Sometimes it makes vast new amounts. Sometimes it makes lesser amounts. The money takes a variety of forms and enters the system in various ways. And the Fed does this through techniques such as open-market operations, changing reserve ratios, and manipulating interest rates, operations that all result in money creation.

The government must do all it can to help reduce interest rates for business.

In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation. There is no safe store of value.

Deflation isn't good, and inflation is easier to cure than deflation.