Ben Bernanke Quotes

The U.S. government has a technology, called a printing press (or, today, its electronic equivalent), that allows it to produce as many U.S. dollars as it wishes at essentially no cost.

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.

Printing money is merely taxation in another form.

Printing money is merely taxation in another form. Rather than robbing citizens of their money, government robs their money of its purchasing power.

If government manages to establish paper tickets or bank credit as money, as equivalent to gold grams or ounces, then the government, as dominant money-supplier, becomes free to create money costlessly and at will. As a result, this 'inflation' of the money supply destroys the value of the dollar or pound, drives up prices, cripples economic calculation, and hobbles and seriously damages the workings of the market economy.

Printing money is the last resort of desperate governments when all other policies have failed.

Printing money creates inflation, which weakens an economy. Unfortunately, this kind of common-sense thinking never seems to penetrate academic circles.

The United States can pay any debt it has because we can always print money to do that. So there is zero probability of default.

The value of a dollar is social, as it is created by society.

Experience shows that high and unstable inflation can harm growth. A noninflationary macroeconomic policy is, therefore, a prerequisite for rapid development. Control of government borrowing is the crucial element in such a policy. When public borrowing is excessive, governments are soon obliged to finance it by printing money, and rising inflation then follows.

A paper monetary standard means there are no restraints on the printing press or on federal deficits.

The modern banking system manufactures money out of nothing. The process is perhaps the most astounding piece of sleight of hand that was ever invented.

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.

Printing money - is it really the answer? ... If we just print a million dollars for every man, woman, and child in the country and handed it to them, won't that fix everything? Because in order to really look at printing - I like to take everything to the extreme.

We could, of course, always make the payments, simply by printing more money - we simply promise to pay people by giving them dollar bills - but that could set off inflation.

Monetary inflation not only raises prices and destroys the value of the currency unit; it also acts as a giant system of expropriation.

We need to take away the government's money power. The banking industry needs its welfare check ended. The dollar's soundness depends on its being untied from the machine that can make an infinite number of copies of dollars and reduce their value to zero.

When you give government the power to control the money supply, it grows like a tumor until it extinguishes society itself.

Inflation is probably the most important single factor in that vicious circle wherein one kind of government action makes more and more government control necessary. For this reason all those who wish to stop the drift toward increasing government control should concentrate their effort on monetary policy.

Once the idea is accepted that money is something whose supply is determined simply by the printing press, it becomes impossible for the politicians in power to resist the constant demands for further inflation.

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.

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.

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.

In reality there is no such thing as an inflation of prices, relatively to gold. There is such a thing as a depreciated paper currency.

Who controls the issuance of money controls the government!