Economist Quotes

We are having the single worst recovery the U.S. has had since the Great Depression. I don't care how you measure it. The East Coast knows it. The West Coast knows it. North, South, old, young, everyone knows it's the worst recovery since the Great Depression.

The trade deficit is the capital surplus and don't ever think of having a capital surplus as being a bad thing for our country.

The minimum wage is the black teenage unemployment act. It is the guaranteed way of holding the poor, the minorities and the disenfranchised out of the mainstream is if you price their original services too high.

The income effects in an economy always sum to zero.

Sound money is the sine qua non of a prosperous society.

People can change the volume, the location and the composition of their income, and they can do so in response to changes in government policies.

People can also change the timing of when they earn and receive their income in response to government policies.

I think the inflation prospects for the U.S. over the next five or six, seven years, are quite serious. You cannot have a bumper crop in apples without the value or the price of each apple falling. The Fed has had the largest increase in the monetary base in the history of the U.S., from colonial ti

I mean, everyone agrees with stress tests for banks. I mean that's clear. But banks should do that on their own. And they should worry about their own capital functioning. That's what they should do. It shouldn't be a government function.

Government spending is taxation. When you look at this, I've never heard of a poor person spending himself into prosperity; let alone I've never heard of a poor person taxing himself into prosperity.

And let the Fed sell bonds to bring bank reserves back down to required reserve levels, so we have restraint on bank lending and bank issuances of liability.

What I'm not saying is that all government spending is bad. It's not - far, far from it, but there is no free lunch, as a former colleague of mine used to say. There is no public tooth fairy. Father Christmas does not work on the Treasury staff this year. You can never bail someone out of trouble wi

The truth of the matter of is that stimulus money not only doesn't stimulate; it actually reduces output.

Let me just try to give you sort of the intuitive one here on the stimulus funds. If you have a two-person economy - let's imagine we have two farms, and that's the whole world, just two farms. If one of those farmers gets unemployment benefits, who do you think pays for him? Am I going way over you

It has always amazed me how tax cuts don't work until they take effect. Mr. Obama's experience with deferred tax rate increases will be the reverse. The economy will collapse in 2011.

And just remember, every dollar we spend on outsourcing is spent on U.S. goods or invested back in the U.S. market. That's accounting.

And you can't have a prosperous economy when the government is way overspending, raising tax rates, printing too much money, over regulating and restricting free trade. It just can't be done.

The avoidance of taxes is the only intellectual pursuit that still carries any reward.

Like Odysseus, the President looked wiser when he was seated.

It would not be foolish to contemplate the possibility of a far greater progress still.

I work for a Government I despise for ends I think criminal.

Americans are apt to be unduly interested in discovering what average opinion believes average opinion to be.

There is no harm in being sometimes wrong - especially if one is promptly found out.

Successful investing is anticipating the anticipations of others.

Nothing mattered except states of mind, chiefly our own.

It is ideas, not vested interests, which are dangerous for good or evil.

A study of the history of opinion is a necessary preliminary to the emancipation of the mind.

For at least another hundred years we must pretend to ourselves and to every one that fair is foul and foul is fair; for foul is useful and fair is not. Avarice and usury and precaution must be our gods for a little longer still.

Most men love money and security more, and creation and construction less, as they get older.

The importance of money flows from it being a link between the present and the future.