Economic Fluctuations Quotes

Less emphasis on inventories, I think, may tend to dampen business cycles, because business cycles are typically in the grasp of inventory cycles and heavy industry cycles.

Things of this World are in so constant a Flux, that nothing remains long in the same State. Thus People, Riches, Trade, Power, change their Stations; flourishing mighty Cities come to ruine, and prove in time neglected desolate Corners, whilst other unfrequented places grow into populous Countries, fill'd with Wealth and Inhabitants.

Business is many things, the least of which is the balance sheet. It is a fluid, ever changing, living thing, sometimes building to great peaks, sometimes falling to crumbled lumps.

Germany had the misfortune of becoming poisoned, first because of plenty, and then because of want.

The inborn instability of capitalism has been part of the history of the system for several hundred years, including recurrent speculative episodes. There should be no doubt in anyone's mind that we're now having another one of those speculative episodes.

Taxes can set the level of activity around which the economy fluctuates, but they have very little effect on the fluctuations themselves.

The great mass of people are incapable of realizing that in economic life nothing is permanent except change. They regard the existing state of affairs as eternal; as it has been so shall it always be.

Adam Smith's 'invisible hand' is not above sudden, disturbing, movements. Since its inception, capitalism has known slumps and recessions, bubble and froth; no one has yet dis-invented the business cycle, and probably no one will; and what Schumpeter famously called the 'gales of creative destruction' still roar mightily from time to time. To lament these things is ultimately to lament the bracing blast of freedom itself.

The economy is a thoughtless weather system.

Boom and bust is a term that applied to the Conservative years and two of the worst recessions in history.

As the economy gets better, everything else gets worse.

We have fluctuations all the time, business cycles, and they come about in various ways, but normally what sets them off is some reduction in the willingness of our population, our businesses, and foreigners to buy.

There are still many people in America who regard depressions as acts of God. I think Keynes proved that the responsibility for these occurrences does not rest with Providence.

For me, businesses are like buses. You stand on a corner and you don't like where the first bus is going? Wait ten minutes and take another. Don't like that one? They'll just keep coming. There's no end to buses or businesses.

The term 'business cycle' is imprecise. Economic fluctuations affect everyone, not just businesses, and they are, unlike astral cycles, anything but regular.

Capitalism is chronically unstable.Boom and bust has always marked capitalism in the United States. There were panics in 1785, 1791, 1819, 1857, 1869, 1873, 1907, 1929 and 1987.In economies and politics, as in war, an astonishing number of people die, like the man on the railway crossing, defending their right of way. This is a poorly developed instinct in Switzerland. No country so firmly avows the principles of private enterprise but in few have the practical concessions to socialism been more numerous and varied.

Monetary policy causes booms and busts.

If you don't follow the stock market, you are missing some amazing drama.

When it gets into these spikes, with shortages and uproar and so forth, people go bananas, but that's capitalism.

If there's one thing that's certain in business, it's uncertainty.

When the economy was going up, [Milton Friedman and I] both gave the same advice, and when the economy was going down, we gave the same advice. But in between he didn't change his advice at all.

For policy makers interested in using tax policy to stimulate investments or especially to smooth business cycle fluctuations, the results are not promising.

I think the main figure that matters to all of us, including people in the media, is: How does GDP per capita grow? And those figures have been very good. There is a huge flux both up and down, so it isn't like we're all static in status. What's important is that pie grows.

You get recessions, you have stock market declines. If you don't understand that's going to happen, then you're not ready, you won't do well in the markets.

When asked what the stock market will do: It will fluctuate.