From 1966 to 1970 I served as Chairman of the New Haven City Plan Commission.

The runs started in Thailand after the IMF intervened in such a dramatic way. Then the IMF came to Indonesia.

I have many private conversations with Chairman Greenspan and we never reveal what we talk about. So I don’t want to break my rule.

The greatest good fortune of my return to Cambridge in 1946 was that there, in the spring, I met Elizabeth Fay Ringo. We were married a few months later.

Roosevelt talked not only about Freedom from Fear, but also Freedom from Want.

We have the most flexible and adaptive economy. Making sure we sustain the ability of the American economy to perform well is really the priority of economic policy.

The debts are unaffordable. If they won’t cancel the debts I would suggest obstruction; you do it yourselves.

Despite a decade of criticism and budget cuts, the specialised UN agencies have far more expertise and hands-on experience than any other organisations in the world.

By the time I became chairman and there was more of a feeling of urgency, there was a willingness to accept more forceful measures to try to deal with the inflation.

After the United States entered the war, I joined the Naval Reserve and spent ninety days in a Columbia University dormitory learning to be a naval officer.

The broader issue of the real role of the U.S., the foreign assistance aspect of that, who’s going to pay for the security of a global economy?

I think we’ll build a consensus for action on Social Security reform which will reduce that long-term unfunded obligation and put the system on a sustainable basis.

The miserable failures of capitalist economies in the Great Depression were root causes of worldwide social and political disasters.

We had a booming stock market in 1929 and then went into the world’s greatest depression. We have a booming stock market in 1999. Will the bubble somehow burst, and then we enter depression? Well,...

We have to keep our eye on inflation, but so far inflation remains reasonably in check on the global stage.

We must start with the reality that corporations cannot guarantee anyone a lifetime job any more than corporations have a guarantee of immortality.

The idea that UN commitments should be followed by action is indeed a radical one, especially for the United States, where wilful neglect of its own commitments is the rule.

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

At the same time it offered the hope, as it still does, that improved understanding could better the lot of mankind. For me, growing up in the 1930s, the two motivations powerfully reinforced each other.

The great leaders of the second world war alliance, Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, understood the twin sides of destruction and salvation. Their war aims were not only to defeat fascism, but to create a...

Inflation is still pretty well in check. We do have energy prices that are unwelcome, too high. I hope Congress can take some action on that.

Yale places great stress on undergraduate and graduate teaching. I like teaching, and I do a lot of it.

We’ve taken the view that if the rest of the world would democratize and create market economies, that would spread the benefits of prosperity around the world, and that it would enhance our own prosperity,...

We promote domestic savings by also things like the personal accounts associated with the president’s Social Security initiative, which over time would generate more savings.

Globalization was a deep trend pushed by technology and right ideas, as much as anything else.

You don’t fix the problem until you define it.

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

At the time, my personal research objectives were to provide Keynesian economics with more rigorous foundations and to tighten and elaborate the logic of macroeconomic and monetary theory.

Russia has gone through eight years of continuing economic pain.

Moderation of oil prices would be very, very welcome. But overall I think we are in a position of stable growth, sustainable growth, and basically with inflation in check.

We have to adapt and overcome, that’s all we can do.

The truth of good economic doctoring is to know the general principles, and to really know the specifics. To understand the context, and also, to understand that an economy may need some tender loving care,...

We’re focused on doing the things that make the economy perform well, and as you do that, reduce deficits, for one, very important; secondly, keep growth rates high, very important.

We were proposing, in a sense, that the rest of the world be made safe for American ideas, as they adopted intellectual property rights that gave patent protection to our very innovative economy.

And I think the American people look to the leaders to lead. They look to the leaders to take on the big problems. And the president deserves a lot of credit for doing that.

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.

I happily took for granted that I would attend the very good local university and probably go on to its law school. Harvard was my father’s idea.

When countries open up to trade, they generally benefit, because they can sell more, then they can buy more. And trade has two-way gain.

Social Security represents an $11 trillion unfunded obligation. And when I say unfunded obligation, I mean we have to come up with $11 trillion at some point to make the system whole.

All science is static in the sense that it describes the unchanging aspects of things.

The basic idea was that if a country would put its economy as an integrated piece of the world system, that it would benefit from that with economic growth. I concur with that basic view.

Well, I make a practice of not commenting on the role of the relative exchange value of our currency.

In Asia, a lot of successful economies that had been living on their own saving, decided to open up their financial markets to international capital in the early 1990s. So here were countries doing quite...

And one of our points of continuing conversation with our trading partners is the urgency of their taking steps to remove barriers to their improved growth performance.

Well, by the standards of a lot of countries, by Latin American standards, it wasn’t so bad.

I studied economics and made it my career for two reasons. The subject was and is intellectually fascinating and challenging, particularly to someone with taste and talent for theoretical reasoning and quantitative analysis.

The longer you wait, the less fun. If you wait until the bitter end, the whole economy can be destroyed.

The deficit – the U.S. knows our deficit is too large. We are committed to bringing it down. We are bringing it down. The deficit came in for fiscal year ’05 at considerably below where...