William Howard Taft Quotes

The first requisite of a sound monetary system is that it put the least possible power over the quantity or quality of money in the hands of the politicians.

No President has yet repealed the business cycle.

The economy controls the politicians far more than the politicians control the economy.

Supply and demand don’t work on a legislative schedule.

I am afraid the ordinary citizen will not like to be told that the banks can and do create money. And they who control the credit of the nation direct the policy of Governments and hold in the hollow of their hand the destiny of the people

Economic depression cannot be cured by legislative action or executive pronouncement. Economic wounds must be healed by the action of the cells of the economic body - the producers and consumers themselves.

The confounding Political Economy with the Sciences and Arts to which it is subservient, has been one of the principal obstacles to its improvement.

The Great Depression, like most other periods of severe unemployment, was produced by government mismanagement rather than by any inherent instability of the private economy.

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.

The conservative argument is that the economy is like the weather, that it just operates automatically.

Now the truth is, a president really can't control the economy, although his policies do have some effect on it.

Whoever owns the means of credit controls the industrial life of the nation.

Commerce is the greatest of all political interests.

Never underestimate the power of an American President in his early days.

The fate of American companies often hinges on the power of American politicians, bureaucrats and judges.

Control is not a luxury that most Presidents are allowed.

I'll see to it that prices remain stable. That's what I have my storm troopers for.

I learned more about economics from one South Dakota dust storm than I did in all my years in college.

It's very dangerous ... to confuse the confuse the identity and fortune of the President with the success and fortune of the nation.

The national security state controls the President. It controls most of the executive departments.

You simply can’t run an economy as complicated as ours on ideology alone.

Middle class prosperity—economics—depended on middle class power—politics.

Roaming the world as a foreign correspondent for more than a decade, I was able to observe how a variety of vastly different nations organized themselves economically. The inescapable conclusion was that no politician anywhere on the planet has ever actually created a rupee's worth of prosperity.

Economies are about momentum.

It is doubtful if any power he [Theodore Roosevelt] has over us through his office or through his leadership of a party is so great as this which he exercises directly through his example and character.