Quotes about Treasury Management

Polybius

To the senate belongs, in the first place, the sole care and management of the public money. For all returns that are brought into the treasury, as well as all the payments that are issued from it, are directed by their orders. Nor is it allowed to the quaestors to apply any part of the revenue to particular occasions as they arise, without a decree of the senate

This principle survives to this day in the United States and many other countries. Money may only be spent by the Executive Branch without the modern equivalent of “a decree of the senate”—an appropriation bill.

John Maynard Keynes

The boom, not the slump, is the right time for austerity at the Treasury.

Robert Walpole

Have I given any symptoms of an avaricious disposition? Have I obtained any grants from the crown since I have been placed at the head of the treasury? Has my conduct been different from that which others in the same station would have followed?

Ross Perot

The budget should be balanced, the treasury should be refilled, the public debt should be reduced and the arrogance of public officials should be controlled.

Peter Lynch

The more cash that builds up in the treasury, the greater the pressure to piss it away.

Samuel Jackson Randall

If you undertake to divide all these appropriations and have many committees where there should be but one, you will enter upon a path of extravagance that you cannot foresee … until we find the Treasury of the country bankrupt.

Both the House and the Senate, as they got larger, developed an Appropriations Committee. When the committee assessed a departmental appropriation, they had also the responsibility for all the other departmental budgets. However, many of the members of the Appropriations Committee tended to favor the interests of their particular constituency or the special interests to which they were beholden. Other members had little or no influence. So there was immense pressure during Reconstruction to ‘share’ the appropriations ‘plum’ by creating appropriations subcommittees. However, each particular subcommittee loses the perspective of and interest in the budget as a whole. The process has led to budget imbalance pressure ever since. But Randall, the Speaker of the House warned about exactly what would happen. He had earlier served as Chairman of the Appropriations Committee, and he was exactly right.

Oliver E. Williamson

The organization of the government itself is something which we ought to examine in a more self-conscious way - the Federal Reserve and the Treasury and the Securities and Exchange Commission. The mission that each of them has is mainly economic but should be informed by good organizational practices.

John C. Calhoun

I am not one of those who believe that we are bound to vote supplies to cover a deficiency in the treasury whenever called on, without investigating the causes which occasioned it.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan

... an auction of the treasury.

Describing the 1981 Reagan tax cut:

Warren Buffett

We need to throw the resources at this that are necessary. But like I say, we are not spending money. I mean, if we buy these assets intelligently, the United States Treasury will make money. I mean, it's borrowing money. It's just a few percent a year.

Treasury Management Quotes