Joseph Stiglitz Quotes

During an economic crisis, what matters is that the government keeps its foot on the accelerator.

Let me put it very forcefully: No large economy has ever recovered from an economic downturn through austerity. It's not going to happen in the United States, and it's not going to happen in Europe.

I don't accept as an article of faith that lots of short-term stimulus boosts the economy and gets us back on the long-term trajectory.

It's become glib political conventional wisdom in Washington that a massive spending plan will provide a parachute rescue for a cliff-diving economy - landing it safely and with strong enough legs to move toward a healthy future.

Faced with a deep recession, some say the answer is to expand the role of government.

We simply can't spend our way out of a recession.

A government can't cut its way out of a recession any more than you can dig yourself out of a hole.

When you're facing the threat of recession, you need to have an expansionary monetary and fiscal policy. Pre-Keynesian, Hooverite views are dead everywhere except on 19th Street in Washington.

Larger deficits are necessary and proper means to mitigate unemployment as the far greater evil in terms of human welfare.

The entire economy, of course, is locked in a down cycle right now. Last time we weathered this was during another Bush presidency in '90. We were locked in it for a year and a half and everyone came out of it.

The BBC is locked to the reading of the economy that is run out of Ed Miliband and Ed Balls' office. They think if only you spend and borrow more money you can create growth everywhere.

In all modesty, we must admit that governments are not always the best doctors when it comes to diagnosing economic ailments and prescribing the right treatment.

In the middle of a recession, where we're just climbing out of it, where the economy -unemployment is still at 9.7 percent, the idea of raising taxes and reducing spending is a prescription for disaster.

But despite historic levels of obstruction, President Obama was able to bring the economy back from the verge of a second Great Depression.

Long periods of recession, which tend to be self-perpetuating, are usually ended by war, or by preparations for it.

What do you think a stimulus is? It's spending - that's the whole point! Seriously.

Monetary policy cannot do much about long-run growth, all we can try to do is to try to smooth out periods where the economy is depressed because of lack of demand.

When the economy shows signs of faltering, prompt countermoves are required. Even mild measures on the part of government can be effective in the early stages of an economic decline. ... If action is withheld until a recession has gained momentum, strong and costly measures may prove insufficient.

I think that this is the most significant financial crisis in the post-War period for the United States, and it has in fact a global reach.... I think it is extraordinarily important to understand that, as we have seen in many previous examples of different countries and different times, choking up of credit is like taking the lifeblood away from the economy.

We used to think that we could spend our way out of a recession…. I tell you in all candor that that opinion no longer exists.

A national government has to be able to spend money in a recession to make up for the private money that is not being spent.

The economic meltdown that would define every aspect of Obama's economy came to a head well before he became president, of course, and so did the legislation that would be the basis for everything that came after.

Aggressive government spending during the Great Recession was absolutely necessary.

Doing nothing and shrinking spending may save us public money in the short term but could cost us a great deal more over time as the recession takes hold for much longer.

Surely, the best and most effective measure is to get the economy moving and shorten the period of recession or slowdown. That's the rationale for Gordon Brown's 'fiscal stimulus' and it sounds like a good one to me.