Quotes & Sayings About Central Banking

In central banking as in diplomacy, style, conservative tailoring, and an easy association with the affluent count greatly and results far much less. — John Kenneth Galbraith

Central banks have gotten out of the central banking business and into the central planning business, meaning that they are devoted to raising up-if they can-economic growth and employment through the dubious means of suppressing interest rates and printing money. The nice thing about gold is that you can't print it. — James Grant

Central bankers got it right in the United States in 1987 when they avoided deflationary pressures as well as serious trouble in the banking system. — Ben Bernanke

In 1977, when I started my first job at the Federal Reserve Board as a staff economist in the Division of International Finance, it was an article of faith in central banking that secrecy about monetary policy decisions was the best policy: Central banks, as a rule, did not discuss these decisions, let alone their future policy intentions. — Janet Yellen

Monetary reform, if it is to be genuine and successful, must sever money and banking from politics. That's why a modern gold standard must have: no central bank; no fixed rations between gold and silver; no bail-outs; no suspension of gold payments or other bank frauds; no monetization of debt; and no inflation of the money supply, all of which have proved so disastrous in the past. — Lawrence Reed

There have been three great inventions since the beginning of time: fire, the wheel, and central banking. — Will Rogers

When you own gold you're fighting every central bank in the world. That's because gold is a currency that competes with government currencies and has a powerful influence on interest rates and the price of government bonds. And that's why central banks long have tried to suppress the price of gold. Gold is the ticket out of the central banking system, the escape from coercive central bank and government power. — James Rickards

The Federal Reserve System had been established to prevent what actually happened. It was set up to avoid a situation in which you would have to close down banks, in which you would have a banking crisis. And yet, under the Federal Reserve system, you had the worst banking crisis in the history of the United States — Alan Ebenstein

In the U.A.E. we were the least-regulated environment in the region, and over time we are seeing more and more regulation coming in. On the other hand, a central bank can overregulate and choke the economy, and then we will have a dead banking industry. — Abdul Aziz Al Ghurair

Some people charge that Obama is a socialist. He isn't a socialist in the precise sense of the word. He supports corporate medicine, central banking and international banking elites, the military-industrial complex, and, with great exuberance, the surveillance-industrial complex. — Ron Paul

It is no coincidence that the century of total war coincided with the century of central banking. — Ron Paul

Every major war in American history, except the Mexican and Spanish-American, has either led to central banking or resulted from it. Central banking and government have a symbiotic relationship that is often mediated by war. Central banking gives government a way to tap the productive power of the private sector and borrow from the future without the need to rely overmuch on unpopular tax increases. Government gives central banking the extreme profits that derive from immense borrowing to finance wars and other government projects. — Mark David Ledbetter

Monetary policy does not work like a scalpel but more like a sledgehammer. — Liaquat Ahamed

Throughout the 19th century, when there was a laissez-faire mentality and insufficient regulation, you had one crisis after another. Each crisis brought about some reform. That is how central banking developed. — George Soros

Repeal the entire Banking Act of 1933, and Austrian School economists will cheer, especially if the current system were replaced by a 100%-reserve competitive banking with no central bank. That banking reform would give us a sound money system, meaning no more business cycle, bailouts, or inflation. — Llewellyn Rockwell

Clear communication is always important in central banking, but it can be especially important when economic conditions call for further policy stimulus but the policy rate is already at its effective lower bound. — Ben Bernanke

Having examined the nature of fractional reserve and of central banking, and having seen how the questionable blessings of Central Banking were fastened upon America, it is time to see precisely how the Fed, as presently constituted, carries out its systemic inflation and its control of the American monetary system. — Murray Rothbard

It was only with the crisis that debt soared.
Yet many Europeans in key positions - especially politicians and officials in Germany, but also the leadership of the European Central Bank and opinion leaders throughout the world of finance and banking - are deeply committed to the Big Delusion, and no amount of contrary evidence will shake them. As a result, the problem of dealing with the crisis is often couched in moral terms: nations are in trouble because they have sinned, and they must redeem themselves through suffering.
And that's a very bad way to approach the actual problems Europe faces. — Paul Krugman

Central banking has become the new central planning. Under the old central planning, government attempted to manage production and the supply of goods and services. Under the new central planning, the Fed attempts to manage the financial system and the supply and allocation of credit. — Anonymous

The one thing people don't appreciate, I think, is that central banking is not a new development. It's been around for a very long time. — Ben Bernanke

It is a sobering fact that the prominence of central banks in this century has coincided with a general tendency towards more inflation, not less. [I]f the overriding objective is price stability, we did better with the nineteenth-century gold standard and passive central banks, with currency boards, or even with 'free banking.' The truly unique power of a central bank, after all, is the power to create money, and ultimately the power to create is the power to destroy. — Paul Volcker

War has generally had grave and fateful consequences for the American monetary and financial system. We have seen that the Revolutionary War occasioned a mass of depreciated fiat paper, worthless Continentals, a huge public debt, and the beginnings of central banking in the Bank of North America. — Murray Rothbard

Nothing brings home the fragility of the banking system or the potency of a financial crisis more vividly than writing about these issues from the eye of the storm. Watching the world's central bankers and finance officials grappling with the current situation - trying one thing after another to restore confidence, throwing everything they can at the problem, coping daily with unexpected and startling shifts in market sentiment - reinforces the lesson that there is no magic bullet or simple formula for dealing with financial panics. — Liaquat Ahamed

Each central banksought to dominate its government by its ability to control Treasury loans, to manipulate foreign exchanges, to influence the level of economic activity in the country, and to influence cooperative politicians by subsequent economic rewards in the business world. — Carroll Quigley

Refuting the false promises requires philosophic understanding of economic interventionism, central banking, and the deeply flawed foreign policy of meddling in the affairs of other nations. — Ron Paul