Ben Bernanke Quotes

The Fed is totally open.

The crisis in Europe has affected the US economy by acting as a drag on our exports, weighing on business and consumer confidence and pressuring US financial markets and institutions.

Developments in financial markets can have broad economic effects felt by many outside the markets.

Investment banks manage to go bankrupt through their investment-banking activities, commercial banks manage to go bankrupt through their commercial-banking activities.

One might as well try to perform brain surgery with a sledgehammer.

The amount of currency in circulation is not changing. The money supply is not changing in any significant way.

I don't see much evidence of an equity bubble.

In fact, the world needs more nerds.

We do not expect significant spillovers from the subprime market to the rest of the economy or to the financial system.

Indeed, in general, healthy investment returns cannot be sustained in a weak economy, and of course it is difficult to save for retirement or other goals without the income from a job.

Speaking as somebody who has been happily married for 35 years, I can't imagine any choice more consequential for a lifelong journey than the choice of a traveling companion.

A money-financed tax cut is essentially equivalent to Milton Friedman's famous 'helicopter drop' of money.

Life is amazingly unpredictable; any 22-year-old who thinks they know where they will be in 10 years, much less in 30, is simply lacking imagination.

Not all information is beneficial.

Every effort needs to be made to try and offset the costs of Katrina and Rita by reductions in other government programs, especially those that are wasteful, duplicative and ineffective.

In the future, financial firms of any type whose failure would pose a systemic risk must accept especially close regulatory scrutiny of their risk-taking.

The failure of Lehman Brothers demonstrated that liquidity provision by the Federal Reserve would not be sufficient to stop the crisis substantial fiscal resources were necessary.

High levels of homeownership have been shown to foster greater involvement in school and civic organizations, higher graduation rates, and greater neighborhood stability.

No economy can succeed without a high-quality workforce, particularly in an age of globalization and technical change.

The Fed's independence is critical.

Community development has a long history of innovation and learning from experience.

People saw the Depression as a necessary thing - a chance to squeeze out the excesses, get back to Puritan morality. That just made things worse.

Economics has many substantive areas of knowledge where there is agreement, but also contains areas of controversy. That's inescapable.

I am particularly pleased to see that the Bendheim Center for Finance is thriving.

When the economic well-being of their nation demanded a strong and creative response, my colleagues at the Federal Reserve... mustered the moral courage to do what was necessary.

Economic engineering is about the design and analysis of frameworks for achieving specific economic objectives.

As an educator myself, I understand the profound effect that good teachers and a quality education have on the lives of our young people.

If you're in a car crash, you're mostly involved in trying to not go off the bridge, and later on you say, 'Oh my God!'

In many spheres of human endeavor, from science to business to education to economic policy, good decisions depend on good measurement.