Ben Bernanke
Ben Bernanke- “I’m not going to tell you that money doesn’t matter, because you wouldn’t believe me anyway.”
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.
Ben Bernanke
A dozen years ago I was minding my own business teaching Economics 101 in Alexander Hall and trying to think of good excuses for avoiding faculty meetings. Then I got a phone call…
Ben Bernanke
If you are not happy with yourself, even the loftiest achievements won’t bring you much satisfaction.
Ben Bernanke
As the Gospel of Luke says : ‘From everyone to whom much has been given, much will be required; and from the one to whom much has been entrusted, even more will be demanded.”
Ben Bernanke
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. They’re more fun to have a beer with, too.
Ben Bernanke
The greatest forces in Washington are ideas, and people prepared to act on those ideas. Public service isn’t easy. But, in the end, if you are inclined in that direction, it is a worthy and challenging pursuit.
Ben Bernanke
Economics is a highly sophisticated field of thought that is superb at explaining to policymakers precisely why the choices they made in the past were wrong. About the future, not so much.
Ben Bernanke
I’m not going to tell you that money doesn’t matter, because you wouldn’t believe me anyway.
Ben Bernanke
If you are part of the lucky minority with the ability to choose, remember that money is a means, not an end.
Ben Bernanke
Nobody likes to fail but failure is an essential part of life and of learning. If your uniform isn’t dirty, you haven’t been in the game.
Ben Bernanke
Remember that physical beauty is evolution’s way of assuring us that the other person doesn’t have too many intestinal parasites. Don’t get me wrong, I am all for beauty, romance, and sexual attraction –where would Hollywood and Madison Avenue be without them? But while important, those are not the only things to look for in a partner.
Ben Bernanke
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.
Ben Bernanke
A time will come when you will want your own grown-up, busy, hyper-successful children to call you. Also, remember who paid your tuition to Princeton.
Ben Bernanke
The sources of deflation are not a mystery. Deflation is in almost all cases a side effect of a collapse of aggregate demand – a drop in spending so severe that producers must cut prices on an ongoing basis in order to find buyers. Likewise, the economic effects of a deflationary episode, for the most part, are similar to those of any other sharp decline in aggregate spending–namely, recession, rising unemployment, and financial stress.
Ben Bernanke
A deflationary recession may differ in one respect from “normal” recessions in which the inflation rate is at least modestly positive: Deflation of sufficient magnitude may result in the nominal interest rate declining to zero or very close to zero. Once the nominal interest rate is at zero, no further downward adjustment in the rate can occur, since lenders generally will not accept a negative nominal interest rate when it is possible instead to hold cash. At this point, the nominal interest rate is said to have hit the “zero bound.”
Ben Bernanke
…Beyond its adverse effects in financial markets and on borrowers, the zero bound on the nominal interest rate raises another concern–the limitation that it places on conventional monetary policy. Under normal conditions, the Fed and most other central banks implement policy by setting a target for a short-term interest rate–the overnight federal funds rate in the United States–and enforcing that target by buying and selling securities in open capital markets. When the short-term interest rate hits zero, the central bank can no longer ease policy by lowering its usual interest-rate target.
Ben Bernanke
…a variety of policy responses are available should deflation appear to be taking hold. Because some of these alternative policy tools are relatively less familiar, they may raise practical problems of implementation and of calibration of their likely economic effects. For this reason, as I have emphasized, prevention of deflation is preferable to cure. Nevertheless, I hope to have persuaded you that the Federal Reserve and other economic policymakers would be far from helpless in the face of deflation, even should the federal funds rate hit its zero bound.
Ben Bernanke
