Martin Van Buren Quotes

I was Chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City. As you know, there are twelve banks and they have their citizens board, and I got elected to the Fed Chairmanship for the Federal Reserve Kansas City Bank back in the mid-'90s. It might have been 1995-'96.

The Federal Reserve Board is indefensible in theory and indispensable in practice.

When I did my research on this topic, I came to the startling conclusion that the Federal Reserve System does not need to be audited - it needs to be abolished.

In the past, Federal Reserve chairmen have not generally gone directly to the public.

You can't fall back on the private sector and say, 'You take care of the nation's banking system.' That's a fundamental function of the government, the Federal Reserve, the Treasury and the FDIC, etc. All of those agencies have a major role to play there.

The Federal Reserve Act requires the Federal Reserve to report annually on its operations and to publish its balance sheet weekly.

It's a technical, fairly difficult job that has no particular political connotations, so I doubt there are any big campaign contributors dying to be on the Fed. And remember, it doesn't pay very well, certainly by Republican standards.

The Fed's policy choices can always be debated, but the quality and commitment of the Federal Reserve as a public institution is second to none, and I am proud to lead it.

So just as I want pilots on the planes that I fly, when it comes to monetary policy, I want to think that there is someone with sound judgement at the controls.

Talking about Korea, it has pretty high capital ratios at banks and maintains a good credit rating.

The Federal Reserve's job is to do the right thing, to take the long-run interest of the economy to heart, and that sometimes means being unpopular. But we have to do the right thing.

The powers vested in the Federal Reserve Board seen to me highly dangerous especially where there is political control of the Board.

All the banks in Christendom could not control money.

When all things are considered, it will be found best for the Nation to leave the Borrowers and the Lender to make their own Bargains, according to the Circumstances they lie under

Since I’ve become a central banker, I’ve learned to mumble with great incoherence. If I seem unduly clear to you, you must have misunderstood what I said.

If you think about it: a big bank in any country, what is it? Really, as an investment, it's a warrant on economy.

By the beginning of the 20th century, the debate about monetary policy and the nation's financial system had been going on for over a century. Increasingly, the shortcomings of the existing system were causing too much harm to ignore.

We've delegated politics to bankers. The European Central Bank is inside Deutsche Bank, and Deutsche Bank is inside the Bundesbank.

Governments aren't going to go away; banks aren't going to go away.

There is no entity in the world that controls our lives more than the Federal Reserve System

The bold effort the present (central) bank had made to control the government ... are but premonitions of the fate that await the American people should they be deluded into a perpetuation of this institution or the establishment of another like it.

In the United States we have, in effect, two governments ... We have the duly constituted Government ... Then we have an independent, uncontrolled and uncoordinated government in the Federal Reserve System, operating the money powers which are reserved to Congress by the Constitution.

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.

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

The job of the Central Bank is to worry.