Robert Lucas Jr. Quotes

Importantly, in the 1930s, in the Great Depression, the Federal Reserve, despite its mandate, was quite passive and, as a result, financial crisis became very severe, lasted essentially from 1929 to 1933.

After the 1929 crash, the Federal Reserve mistakenly focused its policies on preserving the gold value of the dollar rather than on stabilizing the domestic economy.

Governments can inflate their way out of debt, but that has consequences, doesn't it?

Fiscal crises often turn into financial crises, dealing a blow to the real economy.

The real problem is deflation. That is the opposite of inflation but equally serious to the borrower.

The left-wing agenda wants us to think that the reason there was a depression was because the government didn't do anything. That's not true.

The downturn following the collapse of Japan's so-called bubble economy of the 1980s was not as severe as the Great Depression.

Bond investors want growth much like equity investors, and to the extent that too much austerity leads to recession or stagnation then credit spreads widen out - even if a country can print its own currency and write its own cheques.

If the fiscal cliff occurs, I don't think the Federal Reserve has the tools to offset that event.

Well what would happen is that if Greece defaulted and couldn't pay its debts, all the Greek bonds that are held in other banking systems across Western Europe would suddenly have no value. You could as a knock-on effect create a banking crisis in Western Europe.

The bankers of the country are more to blame than are any other group for the present depression.

I have 13 bankers in my office, and they say that if you go forward with this you will cause the worst financial crisis since World War II.

The way you create deflation is you create an asset bubble.

Herbert Hoover failed through no fault of his own. The Crash of 1929 and the Great Depression were beyond his control, and every remedy he tried failed adequately to work.

When the 1929 crash wiped out disposable income, there were not enough consumers to fuel a recovery.

In 1936, money had no important role. Interest rates were one-eighth of one-eighth of one per cent. I did some research, and I found that the interest on one million dollars of ninety-day Treasuries was $37. People didn't even bother to collect it. The Fed wasn't important.

The lion's share of the damage to the Irish economy was the fault of domestic, economic, and financial mismanagement.

If you look at what happened, I came in the middle of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. And unlike Franklin Delano Roosevelt who waited, well, didn't take office until about three years into the Great Depression, it was happening just as I was elected.

Modern conservatism was forged in the crucible of the 1970s inflation crisis, and in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crash many conservatives were convinced that there was nothing the Federal Reserve could do about the vast army of the unemployed without touching off a similar inflationary spiral.

The Panic of 1819 exerted a profound effect on American economic thought. As the first great financial depression, similar to a modern expansion-depression pattern, the panic heightened interest in economic problems, and particularly those problems related to the causes and cures of depressed conditions.

During an economic crisis, what matters is that the government keeps its foot on the accelerator.

Beyond monetary policy, fiscal policy has traditionally played an important role in dealing with severe economic downturns.

Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have left us with $19 trillion in debt.

In the United States, after World War II, it took about two decades for the message to slowly seep in that inflation was going to be a permanent fact of the American way of life.

Faced with a deep recession, some say the answer is to expand the role of government.