Ben Bernanke Market Quotations

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.

The Mexican debt crisis, Latin American debt crisis, the crises of the 1990s, the Wall Street stock market crash, and other events should have reminded us, and did remind us, that financial instability remains a concern, remains a problem.

To achieve a more balanced international system over time, countries with excessive and unsustainable trade surpluses will need to allow their exchange rates to better reflect market fundamentals.

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.

Until the job market improves, this recovery will not feel like a recovery to most Americans,

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.

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.

Quantitatively, outsourcing abroad simply cannot account for much of the recent weakness in the U.S. labor market and does not appear likely to be an important restraint to further recovery in employment,

Although I expect policy to follow the usual gradualist pattern, the pace of tightening will of necessity respond to evolving economic conditions, particularly the strength of the ongoing recovery in the labor market and developments on the inflation front,

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.

In the absence of a shift in market perceptions of the relative attractiveness of U.S. and foreign assets, government policies would likely have only limited effects on the trade balance.

The greatest single cause of the fiscal surplus of the 1990s was the stock market bubble, which led to an unsustainably high level of economic activity and tax revenues.