John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes

In all modesty, we must admit that governments are not always the best doctors when it comes to diagnosing economic ailments and prescribing the right treatment.

When the economy shows signs of faltering, prompt countermoves are required. Even mild measures on the part of government can be effective in the early stages of an economic decline. ... If action is withheld until a recession has gained momentum, strong and costly measures may prove insufficient.

Any organisation has to go through at least one depression to see how it survives, and a normal economic cycle takes seven years.

The Federal Reserve cannot solve all the economy's problems on its own.

Monetary policy cannot do much about long-run growth, all we can try to do is to try to smooth out periods where the economy is depressed because of lack of demand.

In a normal time, I don't think economic policy makes a large difference one way or another. But in times of crisis it makes all the difference in the world.

If we think we're going to solve our economic problems by monetary policy alone, we are mistaken. History shows that we have to employ fiscal policy as well.

Every economic downturn suffered by this country over the past century can be traced to Federal Reserve policy. The Fed has followed a consistent policy of flooding the economy with easy money, leading to a misallocation of resources and an artificial 'boom' followed by a recession or depression when the Fed-created bubble bursts.

The proper governmental policy in a depression is strict laissez-faire, including stringent budget slashing, and coupled perhaps with positive encouragement for credit contraction.

Things swept so badly that I had distrust - after 1967, let's say - of American Keynesianism. For better or worse, U.S. Keynesianism was so far ahead of where it started. I am a cafeteria Keynesian.

Monetary policy causes booms and busts.

Whatever the economy needs to maintain itself, the government will do it.

Larger deficits are necessary and proper means to mitigate unemployment as the far greater evil in terms of human welfare.

The BBC is locked to the reading of the economy that is run out of Ed Miliband and Ed Balls' office. They think if only you spend and borrow more money you can create growth everywhere.

When there's downward pressure on growth, one choice is to adjust economic policy, increase deficits, relax monetary policy. That might have a short-term benefit, but may not be beneficial for the future.

There are always, of course, job losses of a cyclical nature in a recession.

The president has very little effect on the economy. If you want to put blame or credit, the main person who influences the business cycle is the head of the Federal Reserve Bank.

But despite historic levels of obstruction, President Obama was able to bring the economy back from the verge of a second Great Depression.

Over the last decade, economists seemed to share a broad consensus about economic policy, with the old splits between monetarists and Keynesians apparently being settled by events. But the Great Recession of the last two years has changed everything.

Up until the Depression, recession had a moral character: it was supposed to purge the body economic of the greed and excess that attends a business expansion.

It is no longer a matter of serious controversy whether the government should play a positive role in helping to maintain a high level of economic activity. What we debate nowadays is not the need for controlling business cycles, but rather the nature of governmental action, its timing and its extent.

The harsh truth is that if the policy isn’t hurting it isn’t working. I know there is a difficult period ahead but the important thing is that we cannot and must not fudge the determination to stop inflation in its tracks.

… bad times make for good policies, and good times make for bad policies.

The economic repercussions of a stock market crash depend less on the severity of the crash itself than on the response of economic policymakers, particularly central bankers.

The Keynesian idea is once again accepted that fiscal policy and deficit spending has a major role to play in guiding a market economy. I wish Friedman were still alive so he could witness how his extremism led to the defeat of his own ideas.