Gita Gopinath Quotes

As an economist specializing in the global economy, international trade and debt, I have spent most of my career helping others make big decisions - prime ministers, presidents and chief executives - and so I'm all too aware of the risks and dangers of poor choices in the public as well as the private sphere.

I've lived to see key parts of my research absorbed in textbooks and in central banks around the world. And some finance ministries, too.

In my early days, I wrote my dissertation for MIT at the London School of Economics, really under James Meade, but my dissertation was five chapters on the theory of capital movement, but it didn't mention money.

The IMF is set up to deal with liquidity crises.

We live in an era where the global capital markets are the super power in the world, and when they move against you as they've moved against Russia, as we've all seen in the ruble, there's nothing that can stop that.

In Asia, a lot of successful economies that had been living on their own saving, decided to open up their financial markets to international capital in the early 1990s. So here were countries doing quite well, but they decided they'd borrow a bit more and do even better.

I'm a Ph.D. in economics, and so you analyze every situation uniquely because every international situation is unique.

Believe me, the next step is a currency crisis because there will be a rejection of the dollar, the rejection of the dollar is a big, big event, and then your personal liberties are going to be severely threatened.

I studied economics and made it my career for two reasons. The subject was and is intellectually fascinating and challenging, particularly to someone with taste and talent for theoretical reasoning and quantitative analysis.

Discovering various economists, economic works, reading financial periodicals and keeping up on current events in geopolitics and economics around the world opened my eyes to many facets of how the extended order works.

I was initially very interested in public policy, but then after my masters at Harvard, I felt that it was important to get a better handle on the economics of it as well. I did my Ph.D. in macroeconomics, and my thesis - 'Why Is It That Some Countries Save And Others Not?' - was on savings.

Economic and financial crisis are getting much more usual, and they are not confined to a given country but they immediately spread all over the world, and you have to be prepared for that.

I was a professor at Princeton University. And, in that capacity, I studied for many years the role of financial crisis in the economy.

Imperceptibly, the developed world's manufacturing base was gradually eroding and being replaced by securitized finance that destroyed itself and nearly its economies in 2008.

If you followed this economic crisis and you do not think that the world is getting flatter, you are not paying attention. We saw the entire global economy at one time acting totally in sync. The real truth is the world is even flatter than I thought. Our mortgage crisis is killing Deutsche Bank. You still don't think the world is flat?

I have learned as much in the last three years as in any other comparable period of my life, but with an added realisation of how little over a half century of study one has in fact managed to learn of the whole range of economic policy issues.

I don't know anyone else on Wall Street who ever conducted a major currency reform. Or for that matter, who established a government.

I think that this is the most significant financial crisis in the post-War period for the United States, and it has in fact a global reach.... I think it is extraordinarily important to understand that, as we have seen in many previous examples of different countries and different times, choking up of credit is like taking the lifeblood away from the economy.

In a world of global trade and integrated capital markets, it is natural for economic and financial shocks and policy actions to be transmitted across borders.

None of today’s leading indicators existed a century ago. They were invented to measure the economies of the industrial nation-states of the mid-20th Century… The 21st Century, however, is proving more difficult to measure.

From the end of WWI to today, American economic might would be the decisive factor in the shaping of the world order.

[N]o real leader can aspire to champion both the logic and the morality of free trade without confronting the practice that undermines both: currency manipulation.

There are some outcomes in finance we don't want, and government should regulate that.

Now financial liberalization is just a catastrophe waiting to happen, and there are very well understood reasons for that.

All the central banks are doing is substituting one form of debt with another form of debt. They're issuing short term debt and using it to buy long term debt. In finance, we tend to think that's a neutral activity, even though those stimulus programs are huge.