18 Quotes by Robert Mundell

The price of gold was fixed at $35 an ounce in 1934, but by the time the U.S. got through the Korean War, the Vietnam war, with all the associated secular inflation, the price level had gone up nearly three times.

Monetary discipline forces fiscal discipline on the politicians as well.

I have never believed that central banks should have rigid inflation targeting. That is not a good thing to stabilize. There is nothing in economic theory to back this.

I went to the University of Washington in Seattle. This was a very good place to study, and I learned a lot. But it wasn't the right place for my Ph.D.

The problem started before World War I. The gold standard was working fairly well. But it broke down because of the war and what happened in the 1920s. And then the U.S. started to become so dominant in the world, with the dollar becoming the central currency after the 1930s, the whole world economy shifted.

The public is looking for free lunches, and the political competition for votes makes the politicians offer them free lunches.

The United States can't keep a completely open system if the rest of the world is less open. The United States may have to take a leaf out of the book of Japan, China, and Germany, and have protectionism inside the system.

The most important initiative you could take to improve the world economy would be to stabilize the dollar-euro rate.

As an undergraduate at UBC in Canada, I fell in love with economic theory. It was the right choice for me.