Four decades after Thomas Edison’s spectacular illumination of Lower Manhattan in 1882, electricity had done little to make the country’s factories more productive.
In an economy that already has lost some momentum, one must remain alert to the possibility that greater caution and weakening asset values in financial markets could signal or precipitate an excessive softening in household and business spending.
There are no easy choices. Easy choices are long gone.
The recent evidence increasingly suggests that an economic expansion is already well under way, although an array of influences unique to this business cycle seems likely to moderate its speed.
As long as we issue fiat currency, I see no alternative to a legal tender law.
I have long argued that paying down the national debt is beneficial for the economy: it keeps interest rates lower than they otherwise would be and frees savings to finance increases in the capital stock, thereby boosting productivity and real incomes.
If prices go down, we will have problems – problems in the sense of spillover to other areas, Greenspan said. While he hasn’t seen such spreading yet, I expect to.
Developing protectionism regarding trade and our reluctance to place fiscal policy on a more sustainable path are threatening what may well be our most valued policy asset: the increased flexibility of our economy, which has fostered our extraordinary resilience to shocks.
Improvements in lending practices driven by information technology have enabled lenders to reach out to households with previously unrecognized borrowing capacities.
But how do we know when irrational exuberance has unduly escalated asset values, which then become subject to unexpected and prolonged contractions as they have in Japan over the past decade?
We as central bankers need not be concerned if a collapsing financial asset bubble does not threaten to impair the real economy, its production, jobs and price stability.
I was a fairly good amateur musician, and I was an average professional. But the one thing I saw was that the big band business was fading.
I came to a stark realization: chronic surpluses could be almost as destabilizing as chronic deficits.
Capitalism is based on self-interest and self-esteem; it holds integrity and trustworthiness as cardinal virtues and makes them pay off in the marketplace, thus demanding that men survive by means of virtue, not vices. It is this superlatively moral system that the welfare statists propose to improve upon by means of preventative law, snooping bureaucrats, and the chronic goad of fear.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimated that bar code scanners at checkout counters increased the speed that cashiers could ring up payments by 30 percent and reduced labor requirements of cashiers and baggers by 10 to 15 percent.
In the nineteenth century, the population multiplied by a factor of almost fifteen, from 5.3 million to 76 million, a total larger than any European country except Russia. By 1890, 80 percent of New York’s citizens were immigrants or the children of immigrants, as were 87 percent of Chicago’s.
A study of a cohort of 4,800 African Americans born between 1952 and 1982 shows that, as they grew into adults, 69 percent of the cohort remain in the same county, 82 percent remain in the same state, and 90 percent remain in the same region. The figures for the previous generation were 50 percent, 65 percent, and 74 percent.
America’s share of the world’s patents has increased from 10 percent when Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980 to 20 percent today.
Eisenhower’s biggest domestic achievement was arguably the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956, which called for 41,000 miles of highways to be built by 1969 at an estimated cost of $ 25 billion. Predictably enough, the targets were missed: the first transcontinental interstate, I-80, was not finished until 1986 and the southern interstate, I-10, was not completed until 1990.
The population of the Pacific states increased by 110 percent from 1940 to 1960.