Paul A. Volcker Quotes

For policy makers interested in using tax policy to stimulate investments or especially to smooth business cycle fluctuations, the results are not promising.

Inflation is lower and more stable and the real business cycle fluctuations are more modest.

It is no longer a matter of serious controversy whether the government should play a positive role in helping to maintain a high level of economic activity. What we debate nowadays is not the need for controlling business cycles, but rather the nature of governmental action, its timing and its extent.

The economy is my wheel house.

There are still many people in America who regard depressions as acts of God. I think Keynes proved that the responsibility for these occurrences does not rest with Providence.

Whoever controls the volume of money in any country is absolute master of all industry and commerce.

For decades, my research was driven by outstanding problems in macroeconomics: mainly growth theory and employment theory.

The staff at the Institute will present an analysis on how asset price fluctuations and subsequent structural adjustments influence sustained economic growth, based on Japan's experience since the second half of the 1980s.

In principle, there are only three main components of spending that much matter to monetary policy: consumer spending, business investment and exports and trade.

I was an economics major, which I enjoyed because I had a good business sense.

The Fed needs an approach that consolidates the gains of the Greenspan years and ensures that those successful policies will continue - even if future Fed chairmen are less skillful or less committed to price stability than Mr. Greenspan has been.

Economics is extremely useful as a form of employment for economists.

In New Classical theory, periods of declining employment - business cycle downturns - may be caused by an unexpected decline in aggregate demand, which leaves workers mistakenly holding out for nominal wages that exceed the new market-clearing level.

The fallacy of the neoclassicals is their tenet that total employment, though hit by shocks, can be said always to be heading back to some normal level.

Business cycles lengthened greatly during the 20th century, as central banks learned to manage national economies by raising and lowering interest rates.

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.

Governments of all stripes want to deliver growth and rebalance their economies now that they have learned the hard way that, left to their own devices, markets pick expensive banking losers.

By the experience of commercial nations in all ages it has been found that gold and silver afford the only safe foundation for a monetary system.

In the long run the security of the United States is protected by economic strength. In the short run, military strength, in the long run economic.

Commerce is the greatest of all political interests.

Most certainly it was a very wrong step to Crush the Private Bank, and set up this Publick Bank in its place

The biggest enemy of the United States is not some terrorist hiding in a cave in Afghanistan or Pakistan but our own fiscal irresponsibility

What is prudence in the conduct of every private family, can scarcely be folly in that of a great kingdom.

The problem now is to shape our policy so as to avoid a calamitous break in the stock market … and at the same time accomplish if possible, the recovery of Europe.

If by carelessness in controlling inflation and imposing controls on our general economy we are unable to meet these temporary but vital calls upon us, we will be courting real disaster.