Stephen A. Schwarzman Quotes

The Bank of England should lend in times of internal panic as freely and readily as plain principles of banking require.

The Fed is the major U.S. firefighter. It's not the Treasury. It's not the Congress. We certainly saw that vividly in 2008.

The very existence the Federal Reserve System is a safeguard against anything like a calamity growing out of money rates …. We have the power to deal with such an emergency instantly by flooding the street with money.

The failure of Lehman Brothers demonstrated that liquidity provision by the Federal Reserve would not be sufficient to stop the crisis; substantial fiscal resources were necessary.

Starting in late 2007, faced with acute financial market distress, the Federal Reserve created programs to keep credit flowing to households and businesses. The loans extended under those programs helped stabilize the financial system.

Making economic policy isn't a popularity contest, especially when financial markets are in a panic.

I felt that the Fed had always been the agency that picked up the pieces when there was a financial crisis, and it was invented to do exactly that.

To the extent that bank panics interfere with normal flows of credit, they may affect the performance of the real economy.

Double-digit inflation is a terrible thing - and it got up to 14 or 15 percent on a monthly basis for a while, shortly after I became chairman of the Fed.

As you know, in the latter part of 2008 and early 2009, the Federal Reserve took extraordinary steps to provide liquidity and support credit market functioning, including the establishment of a number of emergency lending facilities and the creation or extension of currency swap agreements with 14 central banks around the world.

When the economic well-being of their nation demanded a strong and creative response, my colleagues at the Federal Reserve... mustered the moral courage to do what was necessary.

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

A lot of people are down on Bernanke, but in my view, he saved the nation.

New policy tools, which helped the Federal Reserve respond to the financial crisis and Great Recession, are likely to remain useful in dealing with future downturns.

Alan Greenspan is the worst Chairman of the Fed in history.

To be sure, the provision of liquidity alone can by no means solve the problems of credit risk and credit losses; but it can reduce liquidity premiums, help restore the confidence of investors, and thus promote stability.

The Obama administration's large and sustained increases in debt raise the specter of another financial crisis and large future tax increases, further chilling business investment and job creation.

The job of the Central Bank is to worry.

The amount of currency in circulation is not changing. The money supply is not changing in any significant way.

The Senate voted 59 to 39 in favor of an amendment I offered to the Budget Resolution calling on the Fed to tell the American people who they loaned $2.2 trillion to and how much each bank received.

The lesson of history is that you do not get a sustained economic recovery as long as the financial system is in crisis.

All the Federal Reserve can do is make loans against collateral.

Obviously, I haven't succeeded in defusing the political concerns about the Fed.

The Federal Reserve cannot solve all the economy's problems on its own.

Inflation is not always the main problem, or indeed a problem at all. Sometimes, though rarely, deflation is a more serious threat, and we need to shelve many of the orthodoxies we have held so dear.