Janet Yellen Quotes

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.

The 2008 financial crisis and the Great Recession that followed have had devastating effects on the U.S. economy and millions of American lives. But the U.S. economy will emerge from its trauma stronger and widely restructured.

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

When you look at the state of the economy right now, you have to set a priority. And my top priority is the deficit of jobs and economic growth, and especially this perception that the United States could be falling behind especially Asian economies.

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.

I want to use every tool in the toolbox that's at our disposal to help our economy and put people back to work.

We have not recovered all that we lost in the Bush recession. That's why we need to continue to move forward.

But if the choice is a cool president and 8 or 10 percent unemployment in a declining economy and a country that seems to be going in the wrong direction and structural unemployment for young people at 50 percent, I'd rather have a dorky president who fixed those problems.

But despite historic levels of obstruction, President Obama was able to bring the economy back from the verge of a second Great Depression.

We are having the single worst recovery the U.S. has had since the Great Depression. I don't care how you measure it. The East Coast knows it. The West Coast knows it. North, South, old, young, everyone knows it's the worst recovery since the Great Depression.

You do not have to be an economist to know that putting up the cost of employing someone is a pretty barking thing to do when you're trying to get out of a recession.

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.

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.

History teaches that the level of unemployment is not as important as whether the rate's going down.

To get anything done, Obama has to be seen as having winning economy - which isn't easy.

Three years ago, this week, a newly elected President Obama faced the American people and he said, look, if I can't turn this economy around in three years, I'll be looking at a one-term proposition, and we're here to collect! You know the results. It's been 35 months of unemployment above 8 percent.

In his first year in office, President Obama pulled us back from the brink of the greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression and worked to lay a new foundation for economic growth. The president identified three key strategies to build that lasting prosperity: innovation, investment, and education.

Economy's got to get moving, we've got to get the unemployment rate down. That may be the defining issue of the campaign.

Before Barack Obama took office, it looked like that pride could have vanished forever, but today, from the staggering depths of the Great Recession, the nation has had 29 straight months of job growth. Workers across my state and across the country are getting back the dignity of a good job and a good salary.

The Obama economy has led to the lowest labor force participation since 1978.

If borrowing and spending all this money led to more jobs than we would be at full employment already.

You don't want to get so distracted, focusing on what the opposition is putting forth that you forget to remind America that the real issue is 8.3 percent unemployment, virtually no growth at all in an economy that has been in shambles for the last four years under Obama.

As America's head coach, President Obama needs to make some big and smart adjustments to jump-start economic growth and business investment, stimulate job creation, and get wages up for ordinary Americans.

The president's economic plan doesn't do enough to create new jobs and that has to be a national priority. While there are some signs the economy is improving, it is not translating into jobs.

Well, our economy is very strong and growing. We have created 5.4 million new jobs in the last 3 years. Our unemployment rate is better than the average unemployment rate of the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s.