“History cannot be reduced to a set of statistics and probabilities.”

The Iraq War is largely about oil.

While these tendencies were no doubt in train in the “old,” pre-1990s economy, they accelerated over the past decade as a number of technologies with their roots in the cumulative innovations of the past half-century began to yield dramatic economic returns.

What an ideology is is a conceptual framework with the way people deal with reality.

Developing protectionism regarding trade and our reluctance to place fiscal policy on a more sustainable path are threatening what may well be our most valued policy asset.

It signals problems with respect to currency markets. Central banks should pay attention to it.

I’m not denying that monopolies are terrible things, but I am denying that it is readily easy to resolve them through legislation of that nature.

If we were to do that we would increase the supply of skilled workers that our schools have been unable to create and as a consequence of that we would lower the average wage of skills and reduce the degree of income inequality in this country.

Enhances a person’s ability to handle the more ambiguous and qualitative relationships that dominate our day-to-day financial decision-making

How do we know when irrational exuberance has unduly escalated asset values?

So there is no reason to suspect that the actual process of boosting rates would be any different.

But how do we know when irrational exuberance has unduly escalated asset values, which then become subject to unexpected and prolonged contractions as they have in Japan over the past decade?

The guiding purpose of the government regulator is to prevent rather than to create something.

Many of those who purchased their residence more than a year ago have equity buffers in their homes adequate to withstand any price decline other than a very deep one.

It seems superfluous to constrain trading in some of the newer derivatives and other innovative financial contracts of the past decade.

Given our inevitably incomplete knowledge about key structural aspects of our ever-changing economy and the sometimes asymmetric costs or benefits of particular outcomes, a central bank.

American consumers might benefit if lenders provided greater mortgage product alternatives to the traditional fixed-rate mortgage.

Before you invest, you must ensure that you have realistically assessed your probability of being right and how you will react to the consequences of being wrong.

There are errors which no wise man will treat with rudeness while there is a probability that they may be the refraction of some great truth still below the horizon.

The true Logic for this world is the Calculus of Probabilities, which takes account of the magnitude of the probability.

It has been pointed out already that no knowledge of probabilities, less in degree than certainty, helps us to know what conclusions are true, and that there is no direct relation between the truth of a proposition and its probability. Probability begins and ends with probability.

The truth is, the greatest tool to lift children and families from poverty is one that decreases the probability of child poverty by 82%. But it isn’t a government spending program. It’s called marriage.

The probability of apocalypse soon cannot be realistically estimated, but it is surely too high for any sane person to contemplate with equanimity.

People dont realize that we cannot forecast the future. What we can do is have probabilities of what causes what, but thats as far as we go. And Ive had a very successful career as a forecaster, starting in 1948 forward.

The United States can pay any debt it has because we can always print money to do that. So there is zero probability of default.