Less emphasis on inventories, I think, may tend to dampen business cycles, because business cycles are typically in the grasp of inventory cycles and heavy industry cycles.

What's the subject of life - to get rich? All of those fellows out there getting rich could be dancing around the real subject of life.

I am suspicious of the idea of a new paradigm, to use that word, an entirely new structure of the economy.

The speed of communication, the speed of information transfer, the cheapness of communication, the ease of moving things around the world are a difference in kind as well as degree.

It was the biggest inflation and the most sustained inflation that the United States had ever had.

Double-digit inflation is a terrible thing - and it got up to 14 or 15 percent on a monthly basis for a while, shortly after I became chairman of the Fed.

When people begin anticipating inflation, it doesn't do you any good anymore, because any benefit of inflation comes from the fact that you do better than you thought you were going to do.

Then it got corrupted with a capital C when Saddam figured out how to make money off of it by putting on the surcharges and kickbacks,

Everybody down the line kept very meticulous records because Saddam told them, 'You get the surcharge from everybody,' ... So they all wanted to document how they got the surcharge.

Well, I started out in the Federal Reserve as a young economist and spent about five years in the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.