Great Comments By Paul Volker

Now these are some great comments. I saw these over the past week and thought that they were so on point that they needed to be shared.

Makes sense to me!

  • “The Federal Reserve, any central bank, should not be asked to do too much to undertake responsibilities that it cannot responsibly meet with its appropriately limited powers,” Volcker said. He said a central bank‘s basic responsibility is for a “stable currency.”
  • “Credibility is an enormous asset,” Volcker said. “Once earned, it must not be frittered away by yielding to the notion that a little inflation right now is a good a thing, a good thing to release animal spirits and to pep up investment.”
  • “The implicit assumption behind that siren call must be that the inflation rate can be manipulated to reach economic objectives,” according to Volcker. “Up today, maybe a little more tomorrow and then pulled back on command. Good luck in that. All experience demonstrates that inflation, when fairly and deliberately started, is hard to control and reverse.”

volker

Here are a few more that I found around the web at BrainyQuote.com and other sites:

  • I am suspicious of the idea of a new paradigm, to use that word, an entirely new structure of the economy.
  • What’s the subject of life – to get rich? All of those fellows out there getting rich could be dancing around the real subject of life.
  • When people begin anticipating inflation, it doesn’t do you any good anymore, because any benefit of inflation comes from the fact that you do better than you thought you were going to do.
  • It is a sobering fact that the prominence of central banks in this century has coincided with a general tendency towards more inflation, not less. [I]f the overriding objective is price stability, we did better with the nineteenth-century gold standard and passive central banks, with currency boards, or even with `free banking.‘ The truly unique power of a central bank, after all, is the power to create money, and ultimately the power to create is the power to destroy.