Central Bank Independence Quotes

My view was that government officials could not sit on the board of the central bank, and I am very happy that has been upheld.

In stabilizing the macroeconomic environment, we have focused on aligning fiscal with monetary policy and nudging the central bank toward the objective of more market-determined exchange rates.

The Federal Reserve is answerable to no one.

We need to take away the government's money power. The banking industry needs its welfare check ended. The dollar's soundness depends on its being untied from the machine that can make an infinite number of copies of dollars and reduce their value to zero.

It may seem strange, but Congress has never developed a set of goals for guiding Federal Reserve policy. In founding the System, Congress spoke about the country's need for "an elastic currency." Since then, Congress has passed the Full Employment Act, declaring its general intention to promote "maximum employment, production, and purchasing power." But it has never directly counseled the Federal Reserve.

You can't have a healthy economy without sound money, which is why we're on the verge of very serious economic problem.

The principle that a central bank, charged with controlling inflation, should be independent from the government is unassailable. It may also be true that it's easier for the central bank to guard its independence from political pressure when it mainly holds government securities.

In a mature economy like India's, which is becoming modern and a financially-oriented economy, an independent central bank, responsible central bank, is really central to success.

If the Federal Reserve pursues a policy which Congress or the President believes not to be in the public interest, there is nothing Congress can do to reverse the policy. Nor is there anything the people can do. Such bastions of unaccountable power are undemocratic. The Federal Reserve System must be reformed, so that it is answerable to the elected representatives of the people.

The main long-run contribution monetary policy can make is to provide a stable macroeconomic and financial environment.

The Fed needs an approach that consolidates the gains of the Greenspan years and ensures that those successful policies will continue - even if future Fed chairmen are less skillful or less committed to price stability than Mr. Greenspan has been.

In 1977, when I started my first job at the Federal Reserve Board as a staff economist in the Division of International Finance, it was an article of faith in central banking that secrecy about monetary policy decisions was the best policy: Central banks, as a rule, did not discuss these decisions, let alone their future policy intentions.

Clear communication is always important in central banking, but it can be especially important when economic conditions call for further policy stimulus but the policy rate is already at its effective lower bound.

I'm just opposed to a pure inflation-only mandate in which the only thing a central bank cares about is inflation and not employment.

The power to determine the quantity of money... is too important, too pervasive, to be exercised by a few people, however public-spirited, if there is any feasible alternative. There is no need for such arbitrary power... Any system which gives so much power and so much discretion to a few men, [so] that mistakes - excusable or not - can have such far reaching effects, is a bad system. It is a bad system to believers in freedom just because it gives a few men such power without any effective check by the body politic - this is the key political argument against an independent central bank.

The power to determine the quantity of money... is too important, too pervasive, to be exercised by a few people, however public-spirited, if there is any feasible alternative. There is no need for such arbitrary power.

To minimize market uncertainty and achieve the maximum effect of its policies, the Federal Reserve is committed to providing the public as much information as possible about the uses of its balance sheet, plans regarding future uses of its balance sheet, and the criteria on which the relevant decisions are based.

Any central bank should only be in charge of liquidity. Solvency is a matter for the treasury.

I'm a big fan of Bitcoin ... Regulation of money supply needs to be depoliticized.

At the end of the day, inflation has been below 2% for quite a long time, and to me, symmetry means getting somewhere above 2% inflation at some point in my Fed career.

In 2008, when Lehman Brothers collapsed, we anticipated that Europe was going to have a very different bailout scheme than the U.S. because of their different political systems and different relationships between the central banks and the fiscal authorities.

From the time I took office as Chancellor of the Exchequer, I began to learn that the State held, in the face of the Bank and the City, an essentially false position as to finance. The Government itself was not to be a substantive power, but was to leave the Money Power supreme and unquestioned.

I'm a strong-and-stable-dollar advocate, and the Fed has been moving dangerously away from that mission.

Federal Reserve officials have stressed the importance of the Fed's independence. But such independence does not mean that it is immune from Congressional oversight.

Audit the Fed is a bill that would politicize monetary policy, would bring short-term political pressures to bear on the Fed. In terms of openness about our financial accounts, we are extensively audited.