Ben Bernanke Form Quotations

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.

I think it's generally a bad idea for the Fed to be the arbiter of asset prices. The Fed doesn't really have any better information than other people in the market about what the correct value of asset prices is.

Certainly there is no way to direct the effects of monetary policy at a single class of assets while leaving other financial markets and the broader economy untouched. One might as well try to perform brain surgery with a sledgehammer.

Not all information is beneficial.

In the future, my communications with the public and with the markets will be entirely through regular and formal channels.

Nobody likes to fail but failure is an essential part of life and of learning. If your uniform isn't dirty, you haven't been in the game.

Community banks are generally doing quite well, and I expect that good performance to continue. Neither bankers nor their supervisors should become complacent.

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 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.'

Although the U.S. economy has managed modest real growth through 2002 and into 2003, most economists agree that a strong and well-balanced recovery will require a greater contribution from the business sector, in the form of increased capital investment and hiring,

These policies include making tax relief permanent, reducing the budget deficit by limiting spending, strengthening retirement and health security through efforts like Social Security reform ... and enhancing energy security.

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

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.

At some point in the future, the committee may decide to take no action at one or more meetings in the interest of allowing more time to receive information relevant to the outlook.

We're much more data-driven. We need to continually re-evaluate our forecasts and think about the prospects for the economy and make our decisions based on what the information is that's coming into our hands.

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