Robert Zoellick Quotes

The government must do all it can to help reduce interest rates for business.

The national debt is totally unlike a family budget for about a gazillion reasons, not the least of which being that families cannot raise money by fiat or deflate the size of their debt unilaterally and that family members die instead of existing infinitely.

The United States can pay any debt it has because we can always print money to do that. So there is zero probability of default.

For many countries, monetary sovereignty is nothing more than an unattainable ideal.

To finance this trade deficit, the U.S. has to borrow from the rest of the world or sell American assets like stocks, businesses, and real estate to the rest of the world.

The Obama administration's large and sustained increases in debt raise the specter of another financial crisis and large future tax increases, further chilling business investment and job creation.

In a world where wealth is growing, you can get away with printing money. Doubling the debt over the next 20 years is not a problem.

It's very difficult to explain to a normal working citizen the implications of what $18 trillion in debt means and what it means when the Federal Reserve buys the U.S. Treasury bonds to finance our loss every month.

Money flows into the US, and inflates US assets, and allows the US to have a monstrous trade deficit. That means we are consuming more than we are producing.

In the '30s, the Keynesian stuff worked at least in the sense that you could print money without inflation because there was all this productivity growth happening. That's not going to work today.

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.

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.

Right now, a majority of the debt is owed to foreign interests, Japan being the largest purchaser of government debt today, soon to be surpassed by China as the number one purchaser of our debt in this Nation.

Credit is a promise to deliver money. It will produce GDP but you'll create credit... So you reach a certain point that that you can't do that anymore... There are choices. And how do we best support, apportion the money? How much is going to be transferred?

Well, I think what we need to remember is that budget deficits can impede economic activity.

I think it's important that people know what raising the debt ceiling is. It's Congress giving permission to the federal government to borrow more money that we don't have, and we borrow it for the purpose of spending it.

All the states are required, either by constitution or by statute, to have balanced budgets - they're not able to print money. So they have to focus on establishing priorities.

From my point of view it's impossible to cut debt in a country with new debt from another country.

If Australia finds it has a strong Australian dollar, and it has higher unemployment, then it would have to respond, and that would either be by increasing domestic demand or by weakening its own currency.

Whoever controls the volume of money in any country is absolute master of all industry and commerce.

There's nothing the people love more than a Federal Reserve joke.

We know that advanced economies with stable governments that borrow in their own currency are capable of running up very high levels of debt without crisis.

At some point, the dollar has to give. You can't just keep printing money, and monetizing debt, and buying bonds, without the dollar imploding.

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

Trillions of dollars are being spent in the name of 'saving' the economy: bailouts, 'stimulus,' omnibus spending bills, budgets, government takeovers of the auto, health care and energy industries, all of which require ever more spending.