Paul Krugman Quotes

I think Stockman is an interesting sort of amalgam.

It's a funny thing, by the way, how people who love free markets are also quite sure that they know that investors are being irrational.

The trouble with poverty, as an issue, is that it has basically exhausted the patience of the general public.

Not all private equity people are evil. Only some.

Republican candidates had to appeal to their base, which is by and large elderly white people arguing with empty chairs.

A message to progressives: By all means, hang Senator Joe Lieberman in effigy.

...instead it seems that business - like weight loss - is a subject wherein hope and fear inspire limitless gullibility.

Tax cuts were not going to be effective at creating jobs, and the job creation record is lousy.

The party of ideas has become the party of Beavis and Butthead.

Democracy or breakdown in Syria would change the whole Middle East overnight.

In fact, I'd say that the sources of the economy's expansion from 2003 to 2007 were, in order, the housing bubble, the war, and - very much in third place - tax cuts.

I'm not sure that the current value of the NASDAQ is justified, but I'm not sure that it isn't.

I really think that people have to think safety; taking risks for higher yield is a bad idea once you're in late or latish middle age.

By rescuing the financial system without reforming it, Washington has done nothing to protect us from a new crisis, and, in fact, has made another crisis more likely.

Friedrich Hayek is not an important figure in the history of macroeconomics.

When the Fed decides that inflation is too high, they have the tools, and they've shown historically that they have the will, to bring it down. And, it might be painful.

The United States in particular and the West in general should be feeling a little embarrassed about all that lecturing we did to the Third World.

The federal government is basically an insurance company with an army.

The economics profession went astray because economists, as a group, mistook beauty, clad in impressive-looking mathematics, for truth.

The great thing about fiscal policy is that it has a direct impact and doesn't require you to bind the hands of future policymakers.

In short, it's a great economy if you're a high-level corporate executive or someone who owns a lot of stock. For most other Americans, economic growth is a spectator sport.

Economists don't usually make good speculators, because they think too much.

You really have to go searching desperately to find any contemporary examples of good, old-fashioned runaway inflation.

[D]ebt increases that didn't arise either from war or from extraordinary financial crisis are entirely associated with hard-line conservative governments.

When depression economics prevails, the usual rules of economic policy no longer apply: virtue becomes vice, caution is risky and prudence is folly.

The public has no idea that the deficit has been falling like a stone.

I predict that in the years ahead Enron, not Sept. 11, will come to be seen as the greater turning point in U.S. society.

The habit of disguising ideology as expertise has created a deficit of legitimacy.

Unsustainable situations usually go on longer than most economists think possible. But they always end, and when they do, it's often painful.

Social Security is a social insurance program - it is not designed to be the same thing as a 401(k).

The French, unfortunately, actually believe what they say, and that has been very destructive.

If you are a good economist, a virtuous economist, you are reborn as a physicist. But if you are an evil, wicked economist, you are reborn as a sociologist.

The Obama campaign seems dangerously close to becoming a cult of personality.

And when the chickens that didn't hatch come home to roost, we will rue the day when, misled by sloppy accounting and rosy scenarios, we gave away the national nest egg.

There's one thing that the Fed has been really good at cracking down on, and that's inflation.

People who are complaining about the Fed are people who've been predicting runaway inflation for five and six years, and it hasn't happened.

What the Depression teaches us is that when the economy is so depressed that even a zero interest rate isn't low enough, you have to put conventional notions of prudence and sound policy aside.

Evidence and expertise have a well-known liberal bias.

But Wall Street people are in fact very smart; they're funny, they're not company men who work their way up the chain.

I have friends, political scientists, sociologists, who all share an interest at least in certain kinds of science fiction.

Programmers have a saying: "garbage in, garbage out.

Some people want the past repeated and have an interest in making sure we don't remember it.

[Conventional wisdom] very heavily tends to reflect the preferences and the interests of the elite.