If you want to understand geology, study earthquakes. If you want to understand the economy, study the Depression.
One might as well try to perform brain surgery with a sledgehammer.
I don’t fully understand movements in the gold price.
Although low inflation is generally good, inflation that is too low can pose risks to the economy – especially when the economy is struggling.
The financial crisis appears to be mostly behind us, and the economy seems to have stabilized and is expanding again.
The risk that the economy has entered a substantial downturn appears to have diminished over the past month or so.
The GSEs are adequately capitalized. They are in no danger of failing.
House prices have risen by nearly 25 percent over the past two years. Although speculative activity has increased in some areas, at a national level these price increases largely reflect strong economic fundamentals.
Not all information is beneficial.
The economist John Maynard Keynes said that in the long run, we are all dead. If he were around today he might say that, in the long run, we are all on Social Security and Medicare.
In fact, the world needs more nerds.
I am very proud of my nerd-dom.
Monetary policy cannot do much about long-run growth, all we can try to do is to try to smooth out periods where the economy is depressed because of lack of demand.
Speaking as somebody who has been happily married for 35 years, I can’t imagine any choice more consequential for a lifelong journey than the choice of a traveling companion.
It must be awfully frustrating to get a small raise at work and then have it all eaten by a higher cost of commuting.
I and others were mistaken early on in saying that the subprime crisis would be contained. The causal relationship between the housing problem and the broad financial system was very complex and difficult to predict.
A money-financed tax cut is essentially equivalent to Milton Friedman’s famous ‘helicopter drop’ of money.
We do not expect significant spillovers from the subprime market to the rest of the economy or to the financial system.
The impact on the broader economy and financial markets of the problems in the subprime markets seems likely to be contained.
Life is amazingly unpredictable; any 22-year-old who thinks they know where they will be in 10 years, much less in 30, is simply lacking imagination.
The central bank needs to be able to make policy without short term political concerns.