213 Quotes by Paul Krugman

When the Fed decides that inflation is too high, they have the tools, and they've shown historically that they have the will, to bring it down. And, it might be painful.

If you can create even the illusion of high profitability for a few years, then when the thing collapses you can walk out of the wreckage a very rich man.

I think if you're a liberal, you believe that we all are, at least to some extent, our brothers' keepers, you really believe that we have a sumptuary responsibility to make sure that life is decent for everybody in America, that you believe that society out to be broadly shared, and you believe that you can't have a real democracy unless you have a little bit, at least, of economic democracy.

The fact is that the two years or so after 9/11 were a terrible time in America - a time of political exploitation and intimidation, culminating in the deliberate misleading of the nation into the invasion of Iraq. It's probably worth pointing out that I'm not saying anything now that I wasn't saying in real time back then, when Bush had a sky-high approval rating and any criticism was denounced as treason. And there's nothing I've done in my life of which I'm more proud.

There's one thing that the Fed has been really good at cracking down on, and that's inflation.

If we discovered that, you know, space aliens were planning to attack and we needed a massive buildup to counter the space alien threat and really inflation and budget deficits took secondary place to that, this slump would be over in 18 months. ... There was a Twilight Zone episode like this in which scientists fake an alien threat in order to achieve world peace. Well, this time, we don't need it, we need it in order to get some fiscal stimulus.

It's a funny thing, by the way, how people who love free markets are also quite sure that they know that investors are being irrational.

we should reject the attempt to divert the national conversation away from soaring inequality toward the alleged moral failings of those Americans being left behind. Traditional values aren't as crucial as social conservatives would have you believe — and, in any case, the social changes taking place in America's working class are overwhelmingly the consequence of sharply rising inequality, not its cause.

Asset bubbles have happened even without not-so-easy money. And, in a depressed economy, where alternative uses of money are not great, people are going to bid up the prices of profitable corporations and stuff like that.