Steve Hanke Quotes

For the first time the committee [Federal Reserve] was using communication — mere words — as its primary monetary policy tool.

The Fed is totally open.

I think the Fed is not designed to have effective tools to deal with the economy. It should settle for just controlling the money supply. And - if it insists, it can worry about inflation.

The role of monetary policy is to smooth out business cycles by promoting steady inflation and healthy labor markets, but modern central bankers have taken an activist turn.

The amount of currency in circulation is not changing. The money supply is not changing in any significant way.

Each money-printing exercise brings about unintended consequences. These unintended consequences are higher inflation rates than had no money been printed.

My gracious, here I am the new chairman ... and I haven't the faintest idea of how you control the money supply. Yet everyone thinks I have it at my fingertips.

Our Federal Reserve has unlimited money raising powers.

The Fed has one power that is unique to it alone: it enables the creation of money out of thin air. Sometimes it makes vast new amounts. Sometimes it makes lesser amounts. The money takes a variety of forms and enters the system in various ways. And the Fed does this through techniques such as open-market operations, changing reserve ratios, and manipulating interest rates, operations that all result in money creation.

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.

The Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) is committed to policies that promote maximum employment and price stability, consistent with our mandate from Congress.

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

Monetary policy itself cannot sensibly be directed at reducing imbalances.

We made a decision that monetary policy will be made by an independent European Central Bank.

The central focus of what we are doing at the Fed is to keep inflation from accelerating - and preferably decelerating.

The Fed has the ability to put money out, it's got the ability to take money back in, and if they don't do that, we will have hyperinflation worse than we had in 1980 and 1981.

In the 1960s, and stretching back to the 1930s, it was felt by many economists that easy money is a reliable way to increase employment.

Well, I think as long as people are talking about stimulus, I think the Fed will be thinking about cutting rates because monetary policy is the better way to go because you can turn it on and turn it off.

It's true that the Federal Reserve faces a lot of political pressure and is unpopular in many circles.

Thus, the use of fiat money is more justifiable in financing a depression than in financing a war.

The Fed [Federal Reserve System], whether it likes it or not, is required to provide adequate reserves to the banking system in order for the government to finance its needs, even when that is inflationary.

We have lost control over the financial system ... by printing much more money than in previous years.

The Fed [Federal Reserve] is the world’s largest hedge fund.

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.

From the beginnings of modern monetary theory, in David Hume's marvelous essays of 1752, 'Of Money and Of Interest,' conclusions about the effect of changes in money have seemed to depend critically on the way in which the change is effected.