Top 60 Ben Bernanke Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “The more important reason is that the research itself provides an important long-run perspective on the issues that we face on a day-to-day basis.”

— Ben Bernanke

2. “Nobody likes to fail but failure is an essential part of life and of learning. If your uniform isn’t dirty, you haven’t been in the game.”

— Ben Bernanke

3. “I’d throw dollars out of helicopters if I had to, to stimulate the economy.”

— Ben Bernanke

4. “Economics is a very difficult subject. I’ve compared it to trying to learn how to repair a car when the engine is running.”

— Ben Bernanke

5. “I am very proud of my nerd-dom.”

— Ben Bernanke

6. “In fact, the world needs more nerds.”

— Ben Bernanke

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

— Ben Bernanke

8. “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.”

— Ben Bernanke

9. “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.”

— Ben Bernanke

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

— Ben Bernanke

11. “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.”

— Ben Bernanke

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

— Ben Bernanke

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

— Ben Bernanke

14. “Our mission, as set forth by the Congress is a critical one: to preserve price stability, to foster maximum sustainable growth in output and employment, and to promote a stable and efficient financial system that serves all Americans well and fairly.”

— Ben Bernanke

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

— Ben Bernanke

16. “Education – lifelong education for everyone – from toddlers to workers well advanced in their careers – is indeed an excellent investment for individuals and society as a whole.”

— Ben Bernanke

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

— Ben Bernanke

18. “The people who best use their advantages, or overcome adversity, and work honestly are those most worthy of admiration.”

— Ben Bernanke

19. “Not all information is beneficial.”

— Ben Bernanke

20. “We’ve never had a decline in house prices on a nationwide basis. So, what I think what is more likely is that house prices will slow, maybe stabilize, might slow consumption spending a bit. I don’t think it’s going to drive the economy too far from its full employment path, though.”

— Ben Bernanke

21. “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.”

— Ben Bernanke

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

— Ben Bernanke

23. “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.”

— Ben Bernanke

24. “The Federal Reserve will not monetize the debt.”

— Ben Bernanke

25. “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.”

— Ben Bernanke

26. “I come from Main Street, from a small town that’s really depressed.”

— Ben Bernanke

27. “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.”

— Ben Bernanke

28. “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.”

— Ben Bernanke

29. “It is not the responsibility of the Federal Bank – nor would it be appropriate – to protect lenders and investors from the consequences of their decisions.”

— Ben Bernanke

30. “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.”

— Ben Bernanke

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31. “Although low inflation is generally good, inflation that is too low can pose risks to the economy – especially when the economy is struggling.”

— Ben Bernanke

32. “I don’t fully understand movements in the gold price.”

— Ben Bernanke

33. “The risk exists that, with aggregate demand exhibiting considerable momentum, output could overshoot its sustainable path, leading ultimately in the absence of countervailing monetary policy action to further upward pressure on inflation.”

— Ben Bernanke

34. “I think one of the lessons of the Depression – and this is something that Franklin Roosevelt demonstrated – was that when orthodoxy fails, then you need to try new things. And he was very willing to try unorthodox approaches when the orthodox approach had shown that it was not adequate.”

— Ben Bernanke

35. “It must be awfully frustrating to get a small raise at work and then have it all eaten by a higher cost of commuting.”

— Ben Bernanke

36. “The risk that the economy has entered a substantial downturn appears to have diminished over the past month or so.”

— Ben Bernanke

37. “The amount of currency in circulation is not changing. The money supply is not changing in any significant way.”

— Ben Bernanke

38. “Both humanity’s capacity to innovate and the incentives to innovate are greater today than at any other time in history.”

— Ben Bernanke

39. “To avoid large and unsustainable budget deficits, the nation will ultimately have to choose among higher taxes, modifications to entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare, less spending on everything else from education to defense, or some combination of the above.”

— Ben Bernanke

40. “The impact on the broader economy and financial markets of the problems in the subprime markets seems likely to be contained.”

— Ben Bernanke

41. “Under a cold turkey strategy, at each policy meeting the Federal Open Market Committee would make its best guess about where it ultimately wants the funds rate to be and would move to that rate in a single step.”

— Ben Bernanke

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

— Ben Bernanke

43. “I think that having good data, good statistics-and the United States generally has better macroeconomic statistics than most countries-and having good economists to interpret those data and present the policy alternatives, has a substantially beneficial effect on policymaking in the United States.”

— Ben Bernanke

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

— Ben Bernanke

45. “With respect to their safety, derivatives, for the most part, are traded among very sophisticated financial institutions and individuals who have considerable incentive to understand them and to use them properly.”

— Ben Bernanke

46. “The more guidance a central bank can provide the public about how policy is likely to evolve the greater the chance that market participants will make appropriate inferences.”

— Ben Bernanke

47. “If you are asking me if I would advocate that the Chinese go to greater flexibility in their exchange rate, I certainly would.”

— Ben Bernanke

48. “If you are not happy with yourself, even the loftiest achievements won’t bring you much satisfaction.”

— Ben Bernanke

49. “I generally leave the details of fiscal programs to the Administration and Congress. That’s really their area of authority and responsibility, and I don’t think it’s appropriate for me to second guess.”

— Ben Bernanke

50. “The best approach here if at all possible is to use supervisory and regulatory methods to restrain undue risk-taking and to make sure the system is resilient in case an asset price bubble bursts in the future.”

— Ben Bernanke