“If we allow terrorism to undermine our freedom of action, we could reverse at least part of the palpable gains achieved by postwar globalization. It is incumbent upon us not to allow that to happen.”

They then need to reach a judgment about the probabilities, costs, and benefits of the various possible outcomes under alternative choices for policy.

A decline in the national housing price level would need to be substantial to trigger a significant rise in foreclosures, because the vast majority of homeowners have built up substantial equity in their homes despite large mortgage.

You can’t have the capitalist system if an increasing number of people think it is unjust.

They seem to sense… that gold and economic freedom are inseparable.

Gold still represents the ultimate form of payment in the world.

It’s not for anything other than an escape from what is perceived to be a fiat money system, paper money, that seems to be deteriorating.

We as central bankers need not be concerned if a collapsing financial asset bubble does not threaten to impair the real economy, its production, jobs and price stability.

The abandonment of the gold standard made it possible for the welfare statists to use the banking system as a means to an unlimited expansion of credit.

The very nature of finance is that it cannot be profitable unless it is significantly leveraged… and as long as there is debt, there can be failure and contagion.

We can see that in the inverse relationship exhibited by price/earnings ratios and the rate of inflation in the past.

Recent episodes in which Fed officials hinted at a shift toward higher interest rates have unleashed significant volatility in markets.

No one has ever eliminated any of that stuff.

Yet deregulation set the stage for an enormous wave of creative destruction in the 1980s.

This is the reason that history has not dealt kindly with the aftermath of protracted periods of low risk premiums.

The increased flexibility of our economy, which has fostered our extraordinary resilience to shocks.

We will have more crises and none of them will look like this because no two crises have anything in common except human nature.

As long as the Palestinians send terrorists onto school buses and to nightclubs to blow up people, Israel has no choice but to build the fence.

Should any terrorist strike or act of war occur in which American lives are lost, we must be on guard for any attempt by the government to turn that tragedy into justification for sweeping action.

But there’s one thing we must all be clear about: terrorism is not the pursuit of legitimate goals by some sort of illegitimate means. Whatever the murderers may be trying to achieve, creating a better world certainly isn’t one of their goals. Instead they are out to murder innocent people.

How do you defeat terrorism? Don’t be terrorized.

Of course, there is nothing intrinsic linking any religion with any act of violence. The crusades don’t prove that Christianity was violent. The Inquisition doesn’t prove that Christianity tortures people. But that Christianity did torture people.

There is no religion of terrorism.

Who knows what true loneliness is – not the conventional word but the naked terror? To the lonely themselves it wears a mask. The most miserable outcast hugs some memory or some illusion.

Terror made me cruel.