It's the price of success: people start to think you're omnipotent.
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.
If two people always agree, one of them is redundant.
The tax code is very inefficient. Both the personal tax code and the corporate tax code. By closing loopholes and lowering rates, you could increase the efficiency of the tax code and create more incentives for people to invest.
A gold standard doesn't imply stability in the prices of the goods and services that people buy every day, it implies a stability in the price of gold itself.
The American people are among the most productive in the world. We have the best technologies. We have great universities. We have entrepreneurs.
The people who best use their advantages, or overcome adversity, and work honestly are those most worthy of admiration.
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.
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.
When prices are stable, people can hold money for transactions and other purposes without having to worry that inflation will eat away at the real value of their money balances.
Equally important, stable prices allow people to rely on the dollar as a measure of value when making long-term contracts, engaging in long-term planning or lending for long periods.
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.
The one thing people don't appreciate, I think, is that central banking is not a new development. It's been around for a very long time.
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.
Income inequality is troubling because, among other things, it means that many people in our society don't have the opportunities to advance themselves.
Because a person has to be either working or looking for work to be counted as part of the labor force, an increase in the number of people too discouraged to continue their search for work would reduce the unemployment rate, all else being equal - but not for a positive reason.