“Revolutions are something you see only in retrospect.”

Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the confiscation of wealth.If I seem unduly clear to you, you must have misunderstood what I said.

Senator, if I seem clear to you, you must have misunderstood me’.

We may be in a rapidly evolving international financial system with all the bells and whistles of the so-called new economy. But the old-economy rules of prudence are as formidable as ever. We violate them at our own peril.

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.

There’s a kind of edge to what you’re doing, the kind of leading edge of what you’re doing. Inside that edge [are elements you] are familiar with, and are probably becoming slightly bored with, as well, over a period of time. “I’ve pulled that one out before. Oh, no, I can’t I’m just fed up with that.

Often continuity is visible only in retrospect.

It is the mark of a good action that it appears inevitable in retrospect.

The mark of a good action is that it appears inevitable in retrospect.

The current financial crisis in the US is likely to be judged in retrospect as the most wrenching since the end of the Second World War.

Excessive optimism sows the seeds of its own reversal.

People always understand everything in retrospect.