“Gold, unlike all other commodities, is a currency…and the major thrust in the demand for gold is not for jewelry.”

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.

Gold and silver, like other commodities, have an intrinsic value, which is not arbitrary, but is dependent on their scarcity, the quantity of labour bestowed in procuring them, and the value of the capital employed in the mines which produce them.

If a commodity were in no way useful, – in other words, if it could in no way contribute to our gratification, – it would be destitute of exchangeable value, however scarce it might be, or whatever quantity of labour might be necessary to procure it.

Possessing utility, commodities derive their exchangeable value from two sources: from their scarcity, and from the quantity of labour required to obtain them.

If the demand for home commodities should be diminished, because of the fall of rent on the part of the landlords, it will be increased in a far greater degree by the increased opulence of the commercial classes.

Neither machines, nor the commodities made by them, rise in real value, but all commodities made by machines fall, and fall in proportion to their durability.

The exchangeable value of all commodities rises as the difficulties of their production increase.

Any commodity that sees its price going higher will see new mines opening up.

No extension of foreign trade will immediately increase the amount of value in a country, although it will very powerfully contribute to increase the mass of commodities and therefore the sum of enjoyments.