James Buchan Quotes

If one wants to avoid the recurrence of economic crises, one must avoid the expansion of credit that creates the boom and inevitably leads into the slump.

As 'Austrian' business cycle theory has pointed out, any bank credit inflation sets up conditions for boom-and-bust; there is no need for prices actually to rise.

The euphoria around economic booms often obscures the possibility for a bust, which explains why leaders typically miss the warning signs.

The downturn following the collapse of Japan's so-called bubble economy of the 1980s was not as severe as the Great Depression.

Not every business cycle has a financial crisis. Frequently they do.

The way you create deflation is you create an asset bubble.

Every serious deflation I've looked at is preceded by an asset bubble, and then it bursts.

If we did go into a recession, something that's always possible for the U.S. or Europe, we could lower interest rates and expand the money supply without worrying about the price of gold.

I think money is due for some sort of collapse. People are going to realize that money has a half-life, like radioactive elements.

We had a booming stock market in 1929 and then went into the world's greatest depression. We have a booming stock market in 1999. Will the bubble somehow burst, and then we enter depression? Well, some things are not different.

Most people understand that Lehman Brothers didn't collapse because Gordon Brown built too many schools and hospitals.

I've lived through periods of illiquidity before. Asset prices come down. The economy slows or even goes into recession. Then the cycle re-starts. We buy at lower prices with less leverage.

Should that worse scenario materialize, then most probably our propensity to increase interest rates will be weaker.

With the shrinking of the US economy, and it's shrinking very rapidly, you not only have more money, but you also have fewer goods. That's a classic double-whammy on inflation.

The world is still in deleveraging.

Nationalization, unmentionable only yesterday, has entered common usage not least because an even scarier word - depression - is next on America's list to avoid.

Presidential money is almost like the housing bubble. It's growing at such an astronomical rate, you think it can't get any bigger.

Even if consumer confidence hit rock bottom, that most likely would not be enough, by itself, to cause a depression.

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.

We have one of the highest interest rates in the world, and we owe more money per capita than any other country. All we need is a nail hole in the bottom of the boat and we're sunk.

America had been a boom-and-bust economy going into the Great Depression - just over and over and over, fortunes were wiped out, ordinary families were crushed under it.

The very existence the Federal Reserve System is a safeguard against anything like a calamity growing out of money rates …. We have the power to deal with such an emergency instantly by flooding the street with money.

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.

Economic downturns in the United States generally occur when the Federal Reserve raises interest rates to keep inflation in check When the Fed's Open Market Committee believes that it has brought inflation under control, it can start to lower rates and reverse the downturn. But the recession that began in 2007 [The Great Recession] was unusual: since the Fed did not casuse that downturn by tightening monetary policy, it could not reverse it by lowering short term interest rates. The downturn was the result of market mispricing assets, including financial assets such as equities and mortgage-backed securities and real assets such as housing.

The financial industry may not be synonymous with economics, but it does control a large enough sector of the global economy to sink us all, as was unnervingly demonstrated in 2008.