Deflation Quotes

If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issuance of their currency, first by inflation and then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all their property until their children will wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered.

If there were no debts in our money system, there wouldn't be any money.

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.

I do not think it is an exaggeration to say history is largely a history of inflation, usually inflations engineered by governments for the gain of governments.

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.

Inflation destroys savings, impedes planning, and discourages investment. That means less productivity and a lower standard of living.

We are opposed to swarms of Americans and other foreigners raising prices throughout Germany while millions of Germans are starving because of the increased prices. We are equally opposed to German profiteers and we are demanding that all be imprisoned.

Only God can fix prices.

The entire political class and ruling Wall Street class are zero-percent-interest zombies who talk about 'deflation' in the value of their second, third, and fourth homes. This is paper-deflation, zombie-deflation, and has nothing to do with the real economy.

I do know that throughout history, all paper money has eventually come back to its true value, which is zero.

Money is not something you just print. It must be backed by something, either good economy or gold.

We have depressions about every 10-20 years—just long enough for the current generation to forget the last depression.

Greece's history in the drachma was an up-and-down history, a roller coaster.

What happened was that for every $100 of money, by which I mean the cash that people keep in their pockets, and the deposits they have in the bank, for every $100 of money that there was in 1929, by 1933 there was only $67. The Federal Reserve allowed the quantity of money to decline by a third. While, at all times, it had the possibilities and the power of preventing that from happening.

I think there is universal agreement within the economics profession that the decline - the sharp decline in the quantity of money played a very major role in producing the Great Depression.

Inflation is not always the main problem, or indeed a problem at all. Sometimes, though rarely, deflation is a more serious threat, and we need to shelve many of the orthodoxies we have held so dear.

A system of capitalism presumes sound money, not fiat money manipulated by a central bank. Capitalism cherishes voluntary contracts and interest rates that are determined by savings, not credit creation by a central bank.

Listen, I wish economic growth only went in one direction. It doesn't. There are economic downturns. They're painful, they're harmful, and they hurt families.

The Panic of 1819 exerted a profound effect on American economic thought. As the first great financial depression, similar to a modern expansion-depression pattern, the panic heightened interest in economic problems, and particularly those problems related to the causes and cures of depressed conditions.

How high can bitcoin go? The real question is how low can the dollar go?

Deflation can be particularly dangerous when a financial system is shaky, with household and corporate balance sheets in poor shape and banks undercapitalized and heavily burdened with bad loans.

I am not a monetarist, and I am not a Keynesian. On certain points I agree with each.

As the greatest and last major crisis before 1836, the panic of 1819 holds considerable interest for the study of business cycles and for the present day. It was an economy in transition, as it were, to a state where business cycles as we know them would develop.

In reality there is no such thing as an inflation of prices, relatively to gold. There is such a thing as a depreciated paper currency.

Economists are very good at saying that something cannot go on forever, but not so good at saying when it will stop.