Economic Truth Quotes

We have learned that the various schools of [economic] thought all have important elements of truth in them. But none of them is by itself a sufficient explanation of what goes on in the economy.

Time is money says the proverb, but turn it around and you get a precious truth. Money is time.

You cannot go out and say, oh, I am going to raise all this spending, but it's not going to cost anybody any money.

Instead of more talk about salmon and high-speed rails, more criticism of the Supreme Court or more praise for the Soviet's Sputnik mission - President Obama should use his State of the Union Address to tell the American people the truth about the fundamental financial challenges our country faces.

Pennies do not come from heaven. They have to be earned here on earth.

The current crisis is not simply a market failure in which prices are not functioning properly, but a profound loss of faith in money’s capacity to tell the truth.

The truth is that the government cannot give if it does not take from somebody...It is not in the power of the government to make everybody more prosperous.

The study of money, above all other fields in economics, is one in which complexity is used to disguise truth or to evade truth, not to reveal it. The process by which banks create money is so simple the mind is repelled. With something so important, a deeper mystery seems only decent.

I've been writing a book called The Economics of Innocent Fraud. I published part of it already in The Progressive ("Free Market Fraud," January 1999). But I've been interrupted these last few months. It deals with all of the things we do, in an innocent way, to cover up the truth.

The primary role of the economist is to find out the truth about the real world.

That economics is untrue which ignores or disregards moral values.

Politicians said that with our cheap labour, we could be competitive in the world. Nothing could be further from the truth. We were the most uncompetitive country with that cheap labour.

Repeat after me: 'There is a very limited amount of easy money.'

It is often sadly remarked that the bad economists present their errors to the public better than the good economists present their truths. It is often complained that demagogues can be more plausible in putting forward economic nonsense from the platform than the honest men who try to show what is wrong with it.

You can't view inflation as a perception issue. Price rise should be seen as a reality. What is available for a consumer should be seen for what it is. There should never be an attempt to view price rise as a perception issue as a means of escaping the reality of price rise.

Those who won our independence had confidence in the power of free and fearless reasoning and communication of ideas to discover and spread political and economic truth

In the end, everything came down to money. It came down to what a person actually did, as opposed to who they thought they were.

It turns out the businessman knows more about how the economy really works than the chattering class. What a shock.