Macroeconomic Imbalances Quotes

At the same time the Constitution sets in stone the Stability Pact and risks preventing member States from implementing a policy of growth. So we are not able to do things at the European or the national level.

The emphasis so far on fiscal austerity, while to a degree necessary for the countries facing market funding difficulties, is excessive when carried out across the board.

Blaming speculators as a response to financial crisis goes back at least to the Greeks. It's almost always the wrong response.

By 2007, an uncompetitive, bloated, over-borrowed and distorted Irish economy had been left at the mercy of subsequent international events without the safeguards, institutions, and mindset needed to survive and prosper as a small open economy inside the euro area.

Although this crisis in some ways started in the United States, it is a global crisis. We bear a substantial share of the responsibility for what has happened, but factors that made the crisis so acute and so difficult to contain lie in a broader set of global forces that built up in the years before the start of our current troubles.

I came to a stark realization: chronic surpluses could be almost as destabilizing as chronic deficits.

I think the IMF helped to detonate the Indonesian crisis.

The U.S. didn't save enough; we borrowed a lot. There were structural imbalances in Asia with exporters, with oil exporters for a whole variety of things.