Ludwig von Mises Quotes

Depression is the aftermath of credit expansion.

A depression is a large-scale decline in production and trade...there is nothing in the nature of a free-market economy to cause such an event.

I think when the bottom started to drop out, we didn't recognize it.

The downturn following the collapse of Japan's so-called bubble economy of the 1980s was not as severe as the Great Depression.

I'd be kidding if I said that I predicted the financial collapse.

Between 1857 and 1929, while regulators largely stood idle, the American economy swung through 19 national boom-and-bust gyrations that sometimes threatened to wipe out whole industries within months.

How much would you pay to avoid a second Depression?

Not every business cycle has a financial crisis. Frequently they do.

Viewed from a distance, or through the eye of the All-Knowing CEO of the Universe, the crash of 2008 followed the usual pattern. A long-lived boom driven by cheap credit, going back as far as 1982 (though subject to interruptions in the mid-1980s and 1990s, and in 2001), came to grief because of a rise in the cost of borrowing money.

Up until the Depression, recession had a moral character: it was supposed to purge the body economic of the greed and excess that attends a business expansion.

A recession is a period in which you tighten your belt. In a depression, you have no belt to tighten. In a panic you have no pants left to hold up.

Every economic downturn suffered by this country over the past century can be traced to Federal Reserve policy. The Fed has followed a consistent policy of flooding the economy with easy money, leading to a misallocation of resources and an artificial 'boom' followed by a recession or depression when the Fed-created bubble bursts.

If one wants to avoid the recurrence of economic crises, one must avoid the expansion of credit that creates the boom and inevitably leads into the slump.

As 'Austrian' business cycle theory has pointed out, any bank credit inflation sets up conditions for boom-and-bust; there is no need for prices actually to rise.

The 'boom-bust' cycle is generated by monetary intervention in the market, specifically bank credit expansion to business.

Any organisation has to go through at least one depression to see how it survives, and a normal economic cycle takes seven years.

Credit expansion can bring about a temporary boom. But such a fictitious prosperity must end in a general depression of trade, a slump.

A recession is when your neighbour has to tighten his belt. A depression is when you have to tighten your own belt. And a panic is when you have no belt to tighten and your pants fall down.

To combat the depression by a forced credit expansion is to attempt to cure the evil by the very means which brought it about.

The final outcome of the credit expansion is general impoverishment.

The boom is called good business, prosperity, and upswing. Its unavoidable aftermath, the readjustment of conditions to the real data of the market, is called crisis, slump, bad business, depression.

The patient that's on the floor with the cardiac arrest is not Wall Street. It's the American economy.

Let Wall Street have a nightmare and the whole country has to help them back to bed again.

The euro Titanic has now hit the iceberg - and there simply aren't enough lifeboats to go round.

The Stock Market was down today. Two major businesses declared bankruptcy, consumer spending is at an all time low - in other words, Bush is back on the job.