Milton Friedman Quotes

We borrow 40 cents out of every dollar that we spend. We borrow most of it from countries like China. They have become major creditors of the United States and have more power over our economy than we want them to. So dealing with this is not only the right thing economically, it's certainly right from a moral viewpoint.

To finance this trade deficit, the U.S. has to borrow from the rest of the world or sell American assets like stocks, businesses, and real estate to the rest of the world.

Right now, a majority of the debt is owed to foreign interests, Japan being the largest purchaser of government debt today, soon to be surpassed by China as the number one purchaser of our debt in this Nation.

I know that my Republican colleagues are as ashamed as I am that the United States is forced to borrow over $1 trillion from foreign nations to pay for our national priorities like reconstruction of the gulf coast and the war in Iraq.

China owns more of our bonds than do Americans. That's not a good position to be in.

Every American born today owes $43,000 to the federal government the day she or he is born. And we are transferring a tremendous amount of debt to the new generation, much of it owed to overseas creditors who expect to be repaid by our children with interest.

Have you noticed the debt is exploding? And it's not all because of Medicare.

We have a government that borrows $4 billion a day. We have a government that owes trillions of dollars in debt, half of that to foreigners, most of that to Chinese investors. I don't - that is extreme. Not only is it extreme. It's insane and it's unsustainable.

If our nation goes over a financial Niagara, we won't have much strength and, eventually, we won't have peace. We are currently borrowing the entire defense budget from foreign investors. Within a few years, we will be spending more on interest payments than on national security. That is not, as our military friends say, a 'robust strategy.'

Well, the U.S. is running a current account deficit; we are creating lots of investment opportunities in the United States that exceed our own domestic savings rates, so the issue here is to encourage higher savings rates in the United States.

The amount of U.S. debt held by countries such as China and Japan is at a historic high, with foreign investors holding half of America's publicly held debt. This dependence raises the specter that other nations will be able to influence our policies in ways antithetical to American interests.

I'm outraged that we're building roads, schools, and hospitals in Iraq and Afghanistan, and that we're doing it with borrowed money from China that we're paying interest on. I'm outraged.

Essentially, when we run a deficit, we are borrowing money to buy things that are made overseas.

But if our nation goes over a financial Niagara, we won't have much strength and, eventually, we won't have peace. We are currently borrowing the entire defense budget from foreign investors. Within a few years, we will be spending more on interest payments than on national security. That is not, as our military friends say, a 'robust strategy.'

The United States is a bankrupt nation. It owes the world 14 trillion dollars, and it is truly able to finance itself and the war and the supply of arms to Israel, through the money that is lent to the United States by rich countries, some of which are Muslim countries. And if you stop using the U.S. dollar... Even if you want to sell oil, you can continue to sell oil, but insist on being paid in euros, or yen, or whatever... If you do that, then the U.S. dollar will not be half the value that it has today, and if it doesn't have the value that it has today, it cannot spend money producing arms

American investors [abroad] receive an interest return higher by at least 2 percent on the average than they would receive from similar government or industrial investment within the United States …. It is obvious that they are taking a correspondingly greater risk. A considerable portion of this investment is in areas (as in parts of Latin-America) where political unrest is chronic and where legislation changes rapidly, or in areas in which there is a serious possibility of war or bankruptcy.

The Annual Reports of the British Council of Foreign Bondholders still record the fact that the holders of the bonds of various Southern states, to the amount of sixty million dollars principal (interest at 6 percent for some fifty to eighty years), still are waiting to be repaid.

We've become a debtor nation. I don't mean just on fixed-loan terms, but we own increasingly less abroad than is owned from abroad here.

In general, global economic growth supports Russian economy.

Portfolio investment, often called 'hot money' because of its volatile nature, can increase the economy's vulnerability to the vagaries of international finance. Foreign direct investment, on the other hand, is far more stable and driven by domestic fundamentals.

No one would look just at a firm's revenues to assess how well it was doing. Far more relevant is the balance sheet, which shows assets and liability. That is also true for a country.

Look, they have taken our jobs, they have taken our money, and on top of that they have loaned the money to us and we actually pay them interest now on money. We owe China and Japan each $1.4 trillion.

America has had to turn to foreigners to finance its debt - not surprising since household saving in the last years has plummeted to zero. China is one of the largest holders of American debt.

We look at the mountain to see the painting, then we look at the painting to see the mountain.

Bourgeois society is infected by monomania: the monomania of accounting. For it, the only thing that has value is what can be counted in francs and centimes. It never hesitates to sacrifice human life to figures which look well on paper, such as national budgets or industrial balance sheets.