Lawrence Summers Government Quotations

The ongoing task of debt management for the federal government will clearly be very different in the years ahead than it has been in the past, when debt was rapidly increasing, ... With $3.6 trillion in debt outstanding, even a 3 basis point (0.03 percentage point) reduction in federal borrowing costs will ultimately produce savings of more than $1 billion per year.

The government has done its part, now it's time that people do their part, ... We have never, in our country, had a moment of economic expansion as strong as the present. So right now it is critical to plan for future.

But ultimately what I was impressed by during my years in government was how much the intellectual climate and the prevailing intellectual notions constrained and represented the universe within which the discourse took place.

You can't have a situation in which companies proceed on a permanent basis relying only on cash from the government.

The IMF needs to focus on the fact that it and all of us in government are alongside what are now vast private markets, ... Our role needs to be (to) support rather than supplant those private markets and to try to create a framework in which the flow of private capital will be stable.