Collected Pearls of Wisdom from the Economic Mainstream

The U.S. government has a technology, called a printing press (or, today, its electronic equivalent), that allows it to produce as many U.S. dollars as it wishes at essentially no cost.
- Ben Shalom Bernanke, 21.11.2002

The Federal Reserve is not currently forecasting a recession.
- Ben Shalom Bernanke, 10.01.2008

Stocks have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau.
- Irving Fisher, 16.10.1929

If the Treasury were to fill old bottles with banknotes, bury them at suitable depths in disused coalmines which are then filled up to the surface with town rubbish, and leave it to private enterprise on well-tried principles of laissez-faire to dig the notes up again, there need be no more unemployment and, with the help of the repercussions, the real income of the community, and its capital wealth also, would probably become a good deal greater than it actually is.
- J. M. Keynes, 1936

[It is] comparatively easy to make capital goods so abundant that the marginal efficiency of capital is zero. (...) There are no intrinsic reasons for the scarcity of capital. [Rather, it is] possible for communal saving through the agency of the State to be maintained at a level where it ceases to be scarce.
- J. M. Keynes, 1936

The notion that the creation of credit by the banking system allows investment to take place to which 'no genuine saving' corresponds (...) is to be explained, I think, by an optical illusion.
- J. M. Keynes, 1936

The market process with its cumbersome tatonnements appears old-fashioned. Indeed, it may be considered as a computing device of the pre-electronic age.
- Oskar Lange, 1967

To fight this recession the Fed needs (...) soaring household spending to offset moribund business investment. And to do that (...) Alan Greenspan needs to create a housing bubble to replace the Nasdaq bubble.
- Paul Krugman, 02.08.2002

So never mind those long lists of reasons for Japan's slump. The answer to the country's immediate problems is simple: PRINT LOTS OF MONEY.
- Paul Krugman, ?

The Soviet economy is proof that, contrary to what many skeptics had earlier believed, a socialist command economy can function and even thrive.
- Paul Samuelson, 1989

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