Macroeconomic Policy Quotes

We are all Keynesians now.

When depression economics prevails, the usual rules of economic policy no longer apply: virtue becomes vice, caution is risky and prudence is folly.

My decision to leave applied mathematics for economics was in part tied to the widely-held popular belief in the 1960s that macroeconomics had made fundamental inroads into controlling business cycles and stopping dysfunctional unemployment and inflation.

Just as a poetic discussion of the weather is not meteorology, so an issuance of moral pronouncements or political creeds about the economy is not economics. Economics is a study of cause-and-effect relationships in an economy.

An emerging market is a country where politics matters at least as much as economics to the market

Our approach to economic development must be modern, focused and in tune with the global trend.

We know how to build economies. It requires investment in jobs. The biggest medium-term multiplier is infrastructure.

Although most Americans apparently loathe inflation, Yale economists have argued that a little inflation may be necessary to grease the wheels of the labor market and enable efficiency-enhancing changes in relative pay to occur without requiring nominal wage cuts by workers.

There's nothing in Keynesian economics that would allow you to solve stagflation. But there's nothing in neoclassical economics that would allow you to solve stagflation, either.

Japan has introduced fiscal stimulus five times in the past seven or eight years and each time it's been a failure and that's not a surprise. Fiscal stimulus is not stimulating in and of itself.

There's a stability and growth pact which was agreed for the eleven countries which tries to limit the size of budget deficits among the eleven countries.

The best deficit reduction program is a growing economy.

Our new economic approach is rooted in ideas which stress the importance of macro-economics, post neo-classical endogenous growth theory and the symbiotic relationships between growth and investment, and people and infrastructure.

Fiscal policy is not just, or even not even principally, the purview of the president.

Countries with fiscal space should invest in physical and social infrastructure to raise potential growth.

Things swept so badly that I had distrust - after 1967, let's say - of American Keynesianism. For better or worse, U.S. Keynesianism was so far ahead of where it started. I am a cafeteria Keynesian.

I don't accept as an article of faith that lots of short-term stimulus boosts the economy and gets us back on the long-term trajectory.

With the lessons taken from the financial crisis in 1997, the Republic of Korea has been able to surmount the global economic crisis rather successfully.

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.

So now we are pushing economic reform, bank reform and enterprise reform. So we can finish that reform this year, in September or October. Then our economy may be much more, you know, normalized.

Imagine how much capital a country like Argentina might attract - if instead of defaulting seriatim and affecting a pose of anger toward creditors, it borrowed responsibly and honored its obligations.

Macroeconomic policy can never be devoid of politics: it involves fundamental trade-offs and affects different groups differently.

At the time, my personal research objectives were to provide Keynesian economics with more rigorous foundations and to tighten and elaborate the logic of macroeconomic and monetary theory.

A long-lasting and sustained recovery will never be achieved through massive government spending programs.

Experience shows that high and unstable inflation can harm growth. A noninflationary macroeconomic policy is, therefore, a prerequisite for rapid development. Control of government borrowing is the crucial element in such a policy. When public borrowing is excessive, governments are soon obliged to finance it by printing money, and rising inflation then follows.