Janet Yellen Quotes

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.

In a financial crisis, only the Fed, as the lender of last resort, might stand between our economy and financial catastrophe. We must leave the Fed with the flexibility to provide liquidity in order to stop a financial panic.

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 reason I am so negative about the Federal Reserve's policies is that they only target core inflation and argue that they can't identify bubbles, but when each bubble bursts, they flood the system with liquidity that brings about unintended consequences.

Deflation can be particularly dangerous when a financial system is shaky, with household and corporate balance sheets in poor shape and banks undercapitalized and heavily burdened with bad loans.

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.

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

It's true that monetary policy was too lax for too long, and the government encouraged lending to people who were unlikely to repay their loans.

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

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

Every time the market has corrected, since 2008, it's always been the Fed that's made the bottom. The Fed has always saved the market either by cutting rates, launching QE, or threatening to launch another round of QE.

In 2006, the Congress had approved plans to allow the Fed, beginning in 2011, to pay interest on banks' reserve balances. In the fall of 2008, the Congress moved up the effective date of this authority to October 2008.

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.

When it comes to policies of central bankers, the biggest systemic risk we have... are those policies.

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.

If the Fed is omniscient, why didn't they pull back on the excess money supply that inflated the massive housing bubble that popped so disastrously back in 2008?

The best way that a central bank can support growth on a durable basis is to ensure inflation is low, stable - there is financial stability - and that is the role that the central bank plays.

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

The Fed is the greatest hedge fund in history.

There is a European Central Bank, of course, established and it has the structure similar to the Federal Reserve system, not precisely the same but similar.

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

The Federal Reserve has a responsibility to ensure the safety and soundness of financial institutions and to contain systemic risks in financial markets.

We judged that a sudden, disorderly failure of Bear would have brought with it unpredictable but severe consequences for the functioning of the broader financial system and the broader economy, with lower equity prices, further downward pressure on home values, and less access to credit for companies and households.

If you don't have a functioning financial system the world economy won't be revived. All the major economies have their responsibility to assist at a pace which is required to clean up the balance sheet of the banking system and to ensure that credit flows are resumed.

I think there's no question but what the tail end of the Bush administration, Bush-Cheney administration, that we took steps specifically geared to try and free up the financial sector.