Thomas Sowell Quotes

Economies typically do not function well in hyperinflation. The real value of government debt might disappear, but the economy is likely to disappear with it.

Our government is printing money, and it's degrading the living standard of every person in America. It's the cause of frustration, anger, and confusion.

In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation. There is no safe store of value.

Economic medicine that was previously meted out by the cupful has recently been dispensed by the barrel. These once unthinkable dosages will almost certainly bring on unwelcome after-effects. Their precise nature is anyone's guess, though one likely consequence is an onslaught of inflation.

At some point, the dollar has to give. You can't just keep printing money, and monetizing debt, and buying bonds, without the dollar imploding.

It is a way to take people's wealth from them without having to openly raise taxes. Inflation is the most universal tax of all.

We now have the worst of both worlds – not just inflation on the one side or stagnation on the other side, but both of them together. We have sort of “stagflation” situation.

There's no such thing as a painless cure for inflation.

When you get inflation, you get massive distortions of the economy.

The great fear of every patriot at this moment relates to our currency. The vast over issues of paper money have raised prices to such a pitch as to make the expenses of the Government enormous.... The poor suffer from this enormous inflation of currency. Beef is 1.25 per lb—Butter $4—Eggs 3—clothing is unobtainable ... coffee is $8—sugar 3, etc. so on. Shoes cannot be had under $50 to $60 the pr. for very common ones. God only knows where all this will stop.

Nothing so weakens governments as persistent inflation.

Printing money is the last resort of desperate governments when all other policies have failed.

Double-digit inflation is a terrible thing - and it got up to 14 or 15 percent on a monthly basis for a while, shortly after I became chairman of the Fed.

Businesses that have gone through an episode of hyperinflation become understandably alert to the threat of it: at the first hint of inflation, they're likely to increase prices, since they've learned that if they don't, and inflation hits, their businesses will be wrecked.

The banking collapse was caused, more than anything, by bad government policy and the total failure of bad regulation, rather than by greed.

Believe me, the next step is a currency crisis because there will be a rejection of the dollar, the rejection of the dollar is a big, big event, and then your personal liberties are going to be severely threatened.

The Great Inflation of the 1970s destroyed faith in paper assets, because if you held a bond, suddenly the bond was worth much less money than it was before.

Governments can inflate their way out of debt, but that has consequences, doesn't it?

Each money-printing exercise brings about unintended consequences. These unintended consequences are higher inflation rates than had no money been printed.

Inflation is the crabgrass in your savings.

Only government can take perfectly good paper, cover it with perfectly good ink and make the combination worthless.

Thus, the use of fiat money is more justifiable in financing a depression than in financing a war.

A disordered currency is one of the greatest political evils.

If we continue to print new paychecks at the rate we've been adding them, that mitigates a lot of the damage of higher gasoline prices.

Inflation is one form of taxation that can be imposed without legislation.