David Stockman Quotes

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 only history most economists and financial leaders tend to know is the history of their own careers—an average of about 25 years. The only one who seemed to be familiar with the history of the Great Depression was Ben Bernanke.

The Fed contributed to the financial crisis, keeping interest rates too low for too long. I give them credit for responding and stabilizing the economy and the financial sector during the crisis. But then they tried to do too much with quantitative easing that went on forever, just dramatically exploding their balance sheets.

Alan Greenspan is going to go down in history as one of the worst Federal Reserve chairmen ever.

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.

It's pointless to talk to Fed members about economics because they are academics who believe in money-printing. Some of them believe they didn't print enough, and so with these kinds of people, it is like running to the pope. What do you want to tell them?

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.

The Fed is the biggest enemy of this economy. In fact, Ben Bernanke, as far as I'm concerned, he's public enemy No. 1. We're never going to have a recovery while this guy's in charge.

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

The Global Financial Crisis and Great Recession posed daunting new challenges for central banks around the world and spurred innovations in the design, implementation, and communication of monetary policy.

When the government runs out of lenders, it can do something that households are forbidden to do: print money.

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.

Starting in late 2007, faced with acute financial market distress, the Federal Reserve created programs to keep credit flowing to households and businesses. The loans extended under those programs helped stabilize the financial system.

I know the Federal Reserve Bank can continue to print more and more money... but city and state governments cannot.

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.

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?

America really started to die when the Federal Reserve was founded, and it really started to die in 1971 when the gold backing was taken away from the dollar, and this currency with Ben Bernanke just printing up or counterfeiting as much money as he wants and destroying the economy is really destroying the economy.

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

The Fed is the greatest hedge fund in history.

The time will come, and probably during 2009, that the only way the U.S. will be able to fund its deficits is to create money by printing it. The Treasury will have to sell bonds, and, in the absence of foreign buyers, the Fed will have to print the money to buy them. The consequence will be runaway inflation, increasing interest rates, recession, and inevitable tax increases on all Americans.

A snarky but accurate description of monetary policy over the past five years is that the Federal Reserve successfully replaced the technology bubble with a housing bubble

We can't count on the Fed to inject this level of liquidity that we saw last year.

Under the federal reserve act, panics are scientifically created. The present panic is the first scientifically created one, worked out as we figured, a mathematical equation.

It's complicated.' 'So's quantitative easing. But I still get that it means printing money.

What happened was that for every $100 of money, by which I mean the cash that people keep in their pockets, and the deposits they have in the bank, for every $100 of money that there was in 1929, by 1933 there was only $67. The Federal Reserve allowed the quantity of money to decline by a third. While, at all times, it had the possibilities and the power of preventing that from happening.