Nigel Lawson Quotes

There is no evidence that the business cycle has been repealed.

History is fickle. We know that. The good and bad come around and go around, and go around again. There are recessions and depressions and economic boom and bust.

It doesn't matter if you call it a boom or a bubble. The startup business moves in cycles, and what goes up will eventually come down.

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

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 year 2008 was a reminder to those who had forgotten that there is such a thing as history and that the cycle of famine and feast in commerce, first identified in antiquity and well understood in the Middle Ages, was not suddenly abolished in modern times.

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

No President has yet repealed the business cycle.

Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us that when the storm is long past the ocean is flat again.

There is one policy for recession or depression and another for good times.

There are always, of course, job losses of a cyclical nature in a recession.

I've lived through periods of illiquidity before. Asset prices come down. The economy slows or even goes into recession. Then the cycle re-starts. We buy at lower prices with less leverage.

There will always be a business cycle, and white-collar workers will get hit in the next recession like they always do in recessions.

Listen, I wish economic growth only went in one direction. It doesn't. There are economic downturns. They're painful, they're harmful, and they hurt families.

As sure as the spring will follow the winter, prosperity and economic growth will follow recession.

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.

It has been said that the Fed's job is to take the punch bowl away just as the party gets going, raising interest rates when the economy is growing too fast and inflation threatens.

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.

I don't think it's the end of the world even if we have a recession. We'll pull back out of it again. No big deal.

Booms are great while they last but they don’t last forever.

There shall come seven years of great plenty … And there shall arrive after them seven years of famine, and all the plenty shall be forgotten.

In good years, [the law] does not allow the state to capture so-called surplus revenue to save them for the downside of the business cycle

Economists are very good at saying that something cannot go on forever, but not so good at saying when it will stop.

Economies are about momentum.

We have depressions about every 10-20 years—just long enough for the current generation to forget the last depression.