“The benefit of appointing a hawkish central banker is the increased inflation-fighting credibility that such an appointment brings.”

We do not expect significant spillovers from the subprime market to the rest of the economy or to the financial system.

I served seven years as the chair of the Princeton economics department where I had responsibility for major policy decisions, such as whether to serve bagels or doughnuts at the department coffee hour.

[Virtual Currencies] may hold long-term promise, particularly if the innovations Promote a faster, more secure and more efficient payment system.

Monetary policy cannot do much about long-run growth, all we can try to do is to try to smooth out periods where the economy is depressed because of lack of demand

Importantly, in the 1930s, in the Great Depression, the Federal Reserve, despite its mandate, was quite passive and, as a result, financial crisis became very severe, lasted essentially from 1929 to 1933.

The GSEs are adequately capitalized. They are in no danger of failing.

Speaking as somebody who has been happily married for 35 years, I can’t imagine any choice more consequential for a lifelong journey than the choice of a traveling companion.

Weaker currencies abroad mean a strong dollar, and a stronger dollar, together with a weak global environment, is a drag on the U.S. econom.

If you want to understand geology, study earthquakes. If you want to understand the economy, study the Depression.

If your uniform isn’t dirty, you haven’t been in the game.

I assure this committee that, if I am confirmed, I will be strictly independent of all political influences… essential to that institution’s ability to function effectively and achieve its mandated objectives.

Life is amazingly unpredictable; any 22-year-old who thinks they know where they will be in 10 years, much less in 30, is simply lacking imagination.

I am confident that we will meet whatever challenges the future may bring.

The crisis in Europe has affected the US economy by acting as a drag on our exports, weighing on business and consumer confidence and pressuring US financial markets and institutions.

The central bank needs to be able to make policy without short term political concerns.

A money-financed tax cut is essentially equivalent to Milton Friedman’s famous ‘helicopter drop’ of money.

I think we’re in the take-the-money-and-run stage of the economy. So the banks may go under, but the bankers, who make the policy, clean up.

Why is it possible to rescue S&L buccaneers in the early ’90s and provide guidance to levered Wall Street investment bankers during the 1998 long-term capital management crisis, yet throw 2 million homeowners to the wolves in 2007?

The economic repercussions of a stock market crash depend less on the severity of the crash itself than on the response of economic policymakers, particularly central bankers.

For a country, everything will be lost when the jobs of an economist and a banker become highly respected professions.

Individually the poor are not too tempting to thieves, for obvious reasons. Mug a banker and you might score a wallet containing a month’s rent. Mug a janitor and you will be lucky to get away with bus fare to flee the crime scene.