Economic Contraction Quotes

The Depression, which started in 1929 was rather mild from 1929 to 1930. And, indeed, in my opinion would have been over in 1931 at the latest had it not been that the Federal Reserve followed a policy which led to bank failures, widespread bank failures, and led to a reduction in the quantity of money.

The policy of the Obama administration is to employ regulatory strangulation to drive up the price of energy. This must be exposed and opposed for what it is: a policy of forced economic contraction.

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.

How does a government reduce expenditures? To be absolutely flat about it, 99 per cent of it is accomplished by putting people out of work. Now that is a tough way to say it, but it is a fact.

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.

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.

This is the paradox of thrift: belt-tightening causes people to lose their jobs, because other people are not buying what they produce, so their debt burden rises rather than falls.

The cardinal rule of taxation is that whatever you put a levy on, you'll inevitably get less of. Taxing corporate activity means less investing, less hiring, fewer jobs and a smaller economy, which hurts the rich, the poor and the middle class alike.

No President has yet repealed the business cycle.

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

But how do we know when irrational exuberance has unduly escalated asset values, which then become subject to unexpected and prolonged contractions as they have in Japan over the past decade?

The collapse of the housing bubble sent the world spiraling into recession. The collapse of the energy and commodity bubble threatens to be just as damaging.

The stock market crashed in October 1929. But that was not the cause of what caused the Great Depression. It was, in my opinion, a very minor element of it. What happened was that from 1929 to 1933 you had a major contraction which, in my opinion, was caused primarily by the failure of the Federal Reserve System, to follow the course of action for which it was set up. It was set up to prevent exactly what happened from 1929 to 1933. But instead of preventing it, they facilitated it.

To qualify as a recession, economic activity must decline in an absolute sense; a mere slowdown in real growth is not enough.

That's been lost. It's a huge problem. What you have is you have the major institutions of the world all wanting to deleverage. They want to take down their assets and liabilities. What seemed so easy to borrow against a year ago now looks like rat poison to them. So they're trying to deleverage. There is only one institution in the world that can leverage up in a way that's all a countervailing force to that, and that's the United States Treasury.

The euphoria around economic booms often obscures the possibility for a bust, which explains why leaders typically miss the warning signs.

The Indian business has largely grown on the back of exports. The domestic markets, as far as our Indian business is concerned, actually have contracted because of the contraction in the medium and heavy commercial vehicle space.

If you repress rather than unlock the potential of large groups of Americans, what's that going to do to our economy? It's going to contract, not expand.

One of the first big bubbles, of course, was the huge and horrible South Sea Bubble in England. And the aftermath was interesting. Many of you probably don't remember what happened after the South Sea Bubble, which caused an enormous financial contraction, and a lot of pain. They banned publicly traded stock in England for decades.

Experience shows that a recession is never the result of just a few large industries dragging the economy down while the others continue to expand.

As far as I can find, almost no one in the profession - not even luminaries like John Maynard Keynes, Friedrich Hayek, or Irving Fisher - made public statements anticipating the Great Depression.

I don't think I've been too optimistic. The government believes the contraction will be around 1.5 per cent, as the central bank said. However, we're waiting to see the Commission estimate.

The upward economic movement in America has undoubtedly reached its end – the crisis has come.

An economic recession—even when it is of long duration—does not necessarily involve a decline in all trades.

The proper governmental policy in a depression is strict laissez-faire, including stringent budget slashing, and coupled perhaps with positive encouragement for credit contraction.