373 Quotes by 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.

Following an extended boom in housing, the demand for homes began to weaken in mid-2005. By the middle of 2006, sales of both new and existing homes had fallen about 15 percent below their peak levels. Homebuilders responded to the fall in demand by sharply curtailing construction.

The U.S. government has a technology, called a printing press (or today, its electronic equivalent), that allows it to produce as many U.S. dollars as it wishes at no cost.

The resilience of the economy ... is helping it to absorb the shocks to energy and transportation from the hurricanes.

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.

There's going to be a big impact there for a number of weeks. It's big enough to show up in the national statistics.

There are some petroleum refineries that don't have crude and by allowing them to draw from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve they will be able to produce more gasoline.

There's no magical relationship between inverted yield curves and recession. There's a debate why long-term rates are so low. It's partly a low term premium and a lot of saving looking for a relatively limited number of investments.

There are various estimates about the third quarter impact. Our CEA (Council of Economic Advisers) numbers are somewhere between a half and one percentage point on growth. That would still probably leave us at a decent rate of growth for the third quarter.