“One might as well try to perform brain surgery with a sledgehammer.”

It’s true that the Federal Reserve faces a lot of political pressure and is unpopular in many circles.

House prices have risen by nearly 25 percent over the past two years. Although speculative activity has increased in some areas, at a national level these price increases largely reflect strong economic fundamentals.

Nobody really understands gold prices and I don’t pretend to understand them either.

The Fed is totally open.

I don’t think that Chinese ownership of U.S. assets is so large as to put our country at risk economically.

I am very proud of my nerd-dom.

The financial crisis appears to be mostly behind us, and the economy seems to have stabilized and is expanding again.

In the future, my communications with the public and with the markets will be entirely through regular and formal channels.

While rising delinquencies and foreclosures will continue to weigh heavily on the housing market this year, it will not cripple the U.S.

It’s the price of success: people start to think you’re omnipotent.

Investment banks manage to go bankrupt through their investment-banking activities, commercial banks manage to go bankrupt through their commercial-banking activities.

Economics is a highly sophisticated field of thought that is superb at explaining to policymakers precisely why the choices they made in the past were wrong. About the future, not so much.

The economist John Maynard Keynes said that in the long run, we are all dead. If he were around today he might say that, in the long run, we are all on Social Security and Medicare.

Not all information is beneficial.

So it’s important, as it affects overall levels of production and employment in the U.S. There are many domestic industries doing well in the United States, notwithstanding a strong dollar.

I and others were mistaken early on in saying that the subprime crisis would be contained. The causal relationship between the housing problem and the broad financial system was very complex and difficult to predict.

I understood that I might fail, but I wouldn’t let it happen because I changed my compass along the way.

The past is so often unknowable not because it is befogged now but because it was befogged then, too, back when it was still the present.

And in a world without heroes, as the movie trailer voice-over guy might say, the slightly awkward can be slightly cool.

But this Christ or Redeemer took not upon him the nature of angels, but the seed of Abraham, that is, human nature, that in the nature which sinned he might make the expiation required.

A lot of people would say, to be truthful is to tell all, every dalliance, every crisis. They might be right on paper, but in practice, it’s not a great way to go.

In reality, the world is still run through the principle of ‘Might is right’.

Genius is a sovereign power; it forms schools; it lays hold on the spirits of men, with irresistible might; and it exercises an immeasurable influence on the whole condition of human life

If I can keep this up and nothing interferes with my progress, one of these days I might be able to contribute something to the world.