Mohamed El-Erian Quotes

Political risk is hard to manage because so much comes down to the personal choices of policymakers, whether prime ministers or heads of central banks.

The job of the Central Bank is to worry.

I'm of those who believe that excesses in all matters are not a good idea, whether it's formation of bubbles, whether it's excess in the financial market, whether it's excess of inequality, it has to be watched, it has to be measured, and it has to be anticipated in terms of consequences.

The global economic outlook remains fragile and uncertain. Global economic imbalances persist and we must address them or risk future instability.

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.

As long as there is cash, and the economy is running, all is well. But as a bank, we'll have to test, experiment, try a hundred different things. A few may work, a few may fail, but we have to experiment and try.

I don’t care a damn about stocks and bonds, but I don’t want to see them go down the first day I am President.

There are two problems in my life. The political ones are insoluble and the economic ones are incomprehensible.

If by carelessness in controlling inflation and imposing controls on our general economy we are unable to meet these temporary but vital calls upon us, we will be courting real disaster.

Bailouts may have been more tolerable in the early 1990s when they were rare and their use for a failing bank was uncertain. That is no longer the case.

There is no risk-free path for monetary policy.

Insanity has infected all the central banks of the world.

The risk is that as we come out of this recession, we'll have so much debt to finance, we'll either have to have inflation or very high interest rates to continue to borrow the money, or both. That's a risk.

As boom- and bust-prone as high finance always has been and remains, the greatest systemic risk to our economy is not Wall Street. It's the growing federal debt (and weakening dollar) being enacted by those Washington politicians - the ones who want to protect us from Wall Street.

With government deregulation and the triumph of financial liberalization, the dangers of systemic risks, the possibility of a financial tsunami, sharply increased.

I think one lesson we have to learn is that there's a lot more risk than we're giving credit to, a lot more what economist calls systematic risk.

If an economy in the doldrums could drift indefinitely, the price of government inaction might be graver by far than the consequences of bold unorthodoxy.

We must not forget that … monetary policy all over the world has followed the advice of the stabilizers. It is high time that their influence, which has already done harm enough, should be overthrown.

Some of the policy measures that are important are politically difficult if taken independent of actions by others in support of common goals. Joint actions are therefore needed, and establishing a G-11 with an effective role for the IMF provides the viable way forward.

When you're dealing with a bankrupt sovereign - like the U.S. government - you're dealing with a very powerful wounded bear. You have to be very careful because you can't know what the beast is going to do.

We have made a decision in our economy to lower taxes on successful risk-taking and have been very successful relative to Europe and Japan.

All economic forecasts are subject to considerable uncertainty. There is always a wide range of plausible outcomes for important economic variables, including the federal funds rate.

In the wake of the 2008 recession, Congress and the Obama Administration rightly focused financial regulation on protecting the nation's financial system from itself.

The one instrument that has relative political autonomy is monetary policy. Central banks do not need to go to Congress to get approval for an interest rate hike.

Fragility of modern world leaves me with the idea we'd better anticipate what's going on. We take our right steps today and now. And we'd better avoid, that we are overdependent on, let's say, the internet.