Peter Orszag Quotes

Should that worse scenario materialize, then most probably our propensity to increase interest rates will be weaker.

Fiscal crises often turn into financial crises, dealing a blow to the real economy.

Deflation can be particularly dangerous when a financial system is shaky, with household and corporate balance sheets in poor shape and banks undercapitalized and heavily burdened with bad loans.

The Obama administration's large and sustained increases in debt raise the specter of another financial crisis and large future tax increases, further chilling business investment and job creation.

The real problem is deflation. That is the opposite of inflation but equally serious to the borrower.

The Nasdaq bubble and crash were followed by the real estate bubble then subprime crash, which led to the unprecedented printing of trillions of dollars in an attempt to prevent a global depression.

The world is still in deleveraging.

When you take a look at the problems our country is facing, debt is No. 1. The math is downright scary and the credit markets aren't going to keep on giving us cheap rates.

If the Fed is omniscient, why didn't they pull back on the excess money supply that inflated the massive housing bubble that popped so disastrously back in 2008?

Alan Greenspan is going to go down in history as one of the worst Federal Reserve chairmen ever.

I think there's no question but what the tail end of the Bush administration, Bush-Cheney administration, that we took steps specifically geared to try and free up the financial sector.

Restore, without delay, the equilibrium between revenue and expenditures, which has done so much to destroy our credit and derange the whole fabric of government. If that should not be done, the government and country will be involved, ere long, in overwhelming difficulties.

The reason inflation was brought down to manageable levels, by the time of Ronald Reagan's re-election, was directly attributable to Jimmy Carter's very courageous act, hiring a Federal Reserve chair, with the charge to induce a recession. That recession was probably the reason he didn't win a second term.

People stop buying things, and that is how you turn a slowdown into a recession.

It's true that monetary policy was too lax for too long, and the government encouraged lending to people who were unlikely to repay their loans.

As you know, in the latter part of 2008 and early 2009, the Federal Reserve took extraordinary steps to provide liquidity and support credit market functioning, including the establishment of a number of emergency lending facilities and the creation or extension of currency swap agreements with 14 central banks around the world.

We're facing a natural disaster in the middle of an economic disaster. The federal government has to balance its budget the way our families do.

We have major fiscal problems on our hand.

How much would you pay to avoid a second Depression?

Even if consumer confidence hit rock bottom, that most likely would not be enough, by itself, to cause a depression.

I worry about another leg down in the economies causing social disruption because deleveragings can be very painful - it depends on how they're managed.

We have one of the highest interest rates in the world, and we owe more money per capita than any other country. All we need is a nail hole in the bottom of the boat and we're sunk.

And that's the one thing that people do not understand is that we have very low interest rates and if those go back to historical levels or even go back to scary thoughts that they're back in the late '70s, early '80s, then that's going to really be hard to actually pay off those debts. It's going to be a - it's going to be a very big problem.

Our national finances are in a ruinous state.

The bankers of the country are more to blame than are any other group for the present depression.