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Well, the U.S., of course, is the world's largest economy. It's about a quarter of the world's output. It's also home to many of the largest financial institutions and financial markets.

I generally leave the details of fiscal programs to the Administration and Congress. That's really their area of authority and responsibility, and I don't think it's appropriate for me to second guess.

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

The Fed is totally open.

Well, optimism's a good thing. It - makes people go out and - you know, start businesses and spend and do whatever is necessary to get the economy going.

The crisis and recession have led to very low interest rates, it is true, but these events have also destroyed jobs, hamstrung economic growth and led to sharp declines in the values of many homes and businesses.

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

Monetary policy is not a panacea.

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.

There are limits to monetary policy.

If the fiscal cliff occurs, I don't think the Federal Reserve has the tools to offset that event.

If you are not happy with yourself, even the loftiest achievements won't bring you much satisfaction.

Honest error in the face of complex and possibly intractable problems is a far more important source of bad results than are bad motives.

Remember that physical beauty is evolution's way of assuring us that the other person doesn't have too many intestinal parasites.

I think most of us would agree that people who have, say, little formal schooling but labor honestly and diligently to help feed, clothe, and educate their families are deserving of greater respect - and help, if necessary - than many people who are superficially more successful.

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

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!'

Income inequality is troubling because, among other things, it means that many people in our society don't have the opportunities to advance themselves.

The best solution to income inequality is providing a high-quality education for everybody. In our highly technological, globalized economy, people without education will not be able to improve their economic situation.

China is growing very quickly and is clearly becoming an important player in the world economy.

Banks will have to win the confidence of their customers through fair dealing, making good loans, and remaining financially healthy.

The Fed's independence is critical.

Long term, I have a lot of confidence in the United States. We have an excellent record in terms of innovation. We have great universities that are involved in technological change and progress. We have an entrepreneurial culture, much more than almost any other country.

To the extent that bank panics interfere with normal flows of credit, they may affect the performance of the real economy.

Actually, I'm a Republican.

In a slow-growing world that is short on aggregate demand, Germany's trade surplus is a problem.

If you take a candy bar in the short run, it gives you a burst of energy, but after a while, it just makes you fat.

Interest rates are used to achieve overall economic stability.

A little humility never hurts.

All the Federal Reserve can do is make loans against collateral.

The banks have accounts with the Fed, much the same way that you have an account in a commercial bank.

I came home from school one day, and there was a phone call for me. And I picked up the phone. They said, 'This is the Harvard Admissions Department. We'd like to let you know that you're accepted in the freshman class.' And I said, 'Come on, who is this really?'

I got into economics because I wanted to make things better for the average person.

I was a professor at Princeton University. And, in that capacity, I studied for many years the role of financial crisis in the economy.

The stress on the financial system in the fall of 2007 was significant, but not so significant as to threaten the overall stability of the U.S. economy, although it did lead to the beginning of a recession at the end of 2007.

In September 2008, the two largest housing mortgage companies called Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which were government-sponsored enterprises, which hold hundreds of billions of dollars of mortgages, because of the losses they took on the mortgages, they essentially became insolvent, and the government had to take them over.

There are a number of institutions globally where the Federal Reserve typically leads the U.S. effort to work with financial regulators from other countries, and we try to, to the extent possible, establish international standards for how - the amount of capital a bank should hold, for example, or how much.

In the past, Federal Reserve chairmen have not generally gone directly to the public.

I have spoken about deficits, and I think deficits are important because they address broad economic and financial stability. We need to talk about that.

The biggest downside of my current job is that I have to wear a suit to work. Wearing uncomfortable clothes on purpose is an example of what former Princeton hockey player and Nobel Prize winner Michael Spence taught economists to call 'signaling.'

My proposal that Fed governors should signal their commitment to public service by wearing Hawaiian shirts and Bermuda shorts has so far gone unheeded.

I and others were mistaken early on in saying that the subprime crisis would be contained. The causal relationship between the housing problem and the broad financial system was very complex and difficult to predict.

You want to put the fire out first and then worry about the fire code.

Textbooks describe economics as the study of the allocation of scarce resources. That definition may be the 'what,' but it certainly is not the 'why.'

Aggregate statistics can sometimes mask important information.

We should see better and more direct measurements of economic well being.

As you know, in the latter part of 2008 and early 2009, the Federal Reserve took extraordinary steps to provide liquidity and support credit market functioning, including the establishment of a number of emergency lending facilities and the creation or extension of currency swap agreements with 14 central banks around the world.

Imperfect substitutability of assets implies that changes in the supplies of various assets available to private investors may affect the prices and yields of those assets.

Clear communication is always important in central banking, but it can be especially important when economic conditions call for further policy stimulus but the policy rate is already at its effective lower bound.

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

Because financially capable consumers ultimately contribute to a stable economic and financial system as well as improve their own financial situations, it's clear that the Federal Reserve has a significant stake in financial education.

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.

The Libor system is structurally flawed. It is a major problem for our financial system and for the confidence in the financial system. We need to address it.

One would be forgiven for concluding that the assumed benefits of financial innovation are not all they were cracked up to be.

The Fed needs an approach that consolidates the gains of the Greenspan years and ensures that those successful policies will continue - even if future Fed chairmen are less skillful or less committed to price stability than Mr. Greenspan has been.

Given the extent of the exposures of major banks around the world to A.I.G., and in light of the extreme fragility of the system, there was a significant risk that A.I.G.'s failure could have sparked a global banking panic.

A.I.G. was even larger than Lehman, with a substantial presence in derivatives and debt markets, as well as in insurance markets.

A collapse in U.S. stock prices certainly would cause a lot of white knuckles on Wall Street.

After the 1929 crash, the Federal Reserve mistakenly focused its policies on preserving the gold value of the dollar rather than on stabilizing the domestic economy.

The downturn following the collapse of Japan's so-called bubble economy of the 1980s was not as severe as the Great Depression.

Central bankers got it right in the United States in 1987 when they avoided deflationary pressures as well as serious trouble in the banking system.

Low and stable inflation in many countries is an important accomplishment that will continue to bring significant benefits.

After a long period in which the desired direction for inflation was always downward, the industrialized world's central banks must today try to avoid major changes in the inflation rate in either direction.

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.

No one will lend at a negative interest rate; potential creditors will simply choose to hold cash, which pays zero nominal interest.

I don't know why there aren't more Depression buffs.

The Depression was an incredibly dramatic episode - an era of stock-market crashes, breadlines, bank runs and wild currency speculation, with the storm clouds of war gathering ominously in the background... For my money, few periods are so replete with human interest.

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.

Obviously, I haven't succeeded in defusing the political concerns about the Fed.

Our financial system is so complicated and so interactive - so many different markets in different countries and so many sets of rules.

The world has a great deal more to offer than money.

Identity theft is a serious crime that affects millions of Americans each year.

Chairman Greenspan is, of course, a master.

I would argue that no financial instrument counted as regulatory capital should be allowed to receive any protection from losses.

In all likelihood, a significant amount of time will be required to restore the nearly eight and a half million jobs that were lost nationwide over 2008 and 2009.

History has demonstrated time and again the inherent resilience and recuperative powers of the American economy.

Fostering transparency and accountability at the Federal Reserve was one of my principal objectives when I became Chairman in February 2006.

The Federal Reserve, like other central banks, wields powerful tools; democratic accountability requires that the public be able to see how and for what purposes those tools are being used.

At the most basic level, a central bank must be clear and open about its actions and operations, particularly when they involve the deployment of public funds.

Monetary policy has less room to maneuver when interest rates are close to zero, while expansionary fiscal policy is likely both more effective and less costly in terms of increased debt burden when interest rates are pinned at low levels.

Most of the policies that support robust economic growth in the long run are outside the province of the central bank.

If two people always agree, one of them is redundant.

The Federal Reserve cannot solve all the economy's problems on its own.

Of course, economic forecasts must be revised when new information arrives and are thus necessarily provisional.

As we try to make the financial system safer, we must inevitably confront the problem of moral hazard.

The actions taken by central banks and other authorities to stabilize a panic in the short run can work against stability in the long run if investors and firms infer from those actions that they will never bear the full consequences of excessive risk-taking.

Market discipline can only limit moral hazard to the extent that debt and equity holders believe that, in the event of distress, they will bear costs.

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

Evolving technologies that allow economists to gather new types of data and to manipulate millions of data points are just one factor among several that are likely to transform the field in coming years.

In the tradition of national income accounting, economic policymakers have typically focused on variables such as income, wealth, and consumption.

Evolutionary psychologists suggest that humans experienced evolutionary benefits from brain developments that included aversion to loss and risk and from instincts for cooperation that helped strengthen communities.

History proves... that a smart central bank can protect the economy and the financial sector from the nastier side effects of a stock market collapse.

There will not be an automatic increase in interest rate when unemployment hits 6.5%.

The Federal Reserve has never suffered any losses in the course of its normal lending to banks and, now, to primary dealers.

To minimize market uncertainty and achieve the maximum effect of its policies, the Federal Reserve is committed to providing the public as much information as possible about the uses of its balance sheet, plans regarding future uses of its balance sheet, and the criteria on which the relevant decisions are based.

The public in many countries is understandably concerned by the commitment of substantial government resources to aid the financial industry when other industries receive little or no assistance. This disparate treatment, unappealing as it is, appears unavoidable.

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 financial crisis that began in the summer of 2007 was an extraordinarily complex event with multiple causes.

The Federal Reserve has always recognized the importance of allowing markets to work, and government oversight of financial firms will never be fully effective without the aid of strong market discipline.

If bankers become overly conservative in response to past lending mistakes - or if examiners force such behavior - it will hurt bankers' own long-term interests and the economy in general.

Banks need to continue to lend to creditworthy borrowers to earn a profit and remain strong.

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