Alice Rivlin Quotations

The job of the Central Bank is to worry.

The increase in inequality in income is a longtime trend, but the pressure on middle- and low-income workers is going up rapidly. Especially if they live in an area where there are high housing and gas prices, like California.

It's a technical, fairly difficult job that has no particular political connotations, so I doubt there are any big campaign contributors dying to be on the Fed. And remember, it doesn't pay very well, certainly by Republican standards.

What he's likely to do is to continue writing and speaking, as he has done to some extent at the Fed, and pursuing his interests in economics, which are very intense, ... He loves working with data and thinking of new ideas about the economy. I suspect we will get some of that, and in some ways, he'll be a little bit freer to speak.

No one's really worried about inflation right now.

I wouldn't expect him to do anything different than Greenspan - certainly not at the beginning.

We hope the report won't sit on the shelf somewhere but that it actually gets into the currency of political thinking. With the mayor and council races coming up next year, I think there's a good chance that it will.

Well, it was hard to find anybody, but I called my high school boyfriend and said, 'Can you tell the FBI what I was doing in the summer of '52?' And he said, 'Sure, if you'll remind me.' And I did, and he did, and -- that was fine.

One would hope that you would have a CBO director who does not let ideology get in the way of making good estimates, [Congress] values having a credible institution that they can rely on to give them the best estimates possible.

If simple, painless solutions to public problems existed, they would have been found long ago.

Politicians pay more attention to interest groups than to the public interest.

Cynics about government find much to be cynical about.

The 'American dream' ... means an economy in which people who work hard can get ahead and each new generation lives better than the last one. The 'American dream' also means a democratic political system in which most people feel they can affect public decisions and elect officials who will speak for them. In recent years, the dream has been fading.

The federal budget deficit is the biggest single impediment to revitalizing the American economy.

most economists, like doctors, are reluctant to make predictions, and those who make them are seldom accurate. The economy, like the human body, is a highly complex system whose workings are not thoroughly understood.

The real need is not for more hospital beds. It's for more primary care and keeping people out of hospital beds and emergency rooms.

The situation now is really very different from the 1980s.

The most nervous-making point at the moment is Brazil, ... The international economy rallied around Brazil and hopes very much the Brazilians will be able to fulfill their part of the bargain with the IMF (International Monetary Fund) and keep their economy from going under.

They've been excellent appointments. These people are in the tradition of strong, well-qualified, non-ideological economists.

The remarkable thing about the U.S. is that for so long we were so big, and we were not heavily engaged. We have to worry about global financial crises affecting our economy.

it will be a good long time before there's upward pressure on prices or wages.

It's something we're watching, but not with great concern, ... I think there is room in the world for another major currency and this was one is certainly welcome.

They are not going to raise rates till probably next fall, if that, assuming that the recovery continues to gather momentum.

Indeed, I hope to spend more time and to be more effectively involved in the city than I have been able to be at the Fed,

I had been to Europe that summer, and they said, 'Can anybody verify that?'