Fed Chairman Quotes & Sayings

I can't remember the exact quote but when I used to trade and Mr. Volcker was Fed chairman, he said something like 'gold is my enemy, I'm always watching what gold is doing', we need to think why he made a statement like that. If you're a central banker or one of the congressmen or senators, watch what gold is doing because this is a no-confidence vote in fiscal and dollar policy. — Rick Santelli

It's hard to overstate how utterly mad it is for a Fed chairman in the age of the global economy to claim that a weak currency only affects tourists. It's a little bit like saying a forest fire only really sucks if you're a woodpecker. — Matt Taibbi

If something is wrong for you or me, it is also wrong for the cop, the soldier, the mayor, the governor, the general, the Fed chairman, the president. Theft does not become acceptable when they call it taxation, counterfeiting when they call it monetary policy, kidnapping when they call it the draft, mass murder when they call it foreign policy. We understand that it is never acceptable to wield violence nor the threat of violence against the innocent, whether by the mugger or the politician. — Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr.

Mr. Chairman, when the Fed was passed, the people of these United States did not perceive that a world system was being set up here ... and that this country was to supply the financial power to an international superstate. — Louis Thomas McFadden

Double-digit inflation is a terrible thing - and it got up to 14 or 15 percent on a monthly basis for a while, shortly after I became chairman of the Fed. — Paul A. Volcker

The people in a position to resolve the financial crisis were, of course, the very same people who had failed to foresee it: Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, future Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein, Morgan Stanley CEO John Mack, Citigroup CEO Vikram Pandit, and so on. A few Wall Street CEOs had been fired for their roles in the subprime mortgage catastrophe, but most remained in their jobs, and they, of all people, became important characters operating behind the closed doors, trying to figure out what to do next. With them were a handful of government officials - the same government officials who should have known a lot more about what Wall Street firms were doing, back when they were doing it. All shared a distinction: They had proven far less capable of grasping basic truths in the heart of the U.S. financial system than a one-eyed money manager with Asperger's syndrome. — Michael Lewis

Almost every Fed chairman in the past 60 years has manipulated
interest rates to brighten the economic outlook for incumbent presidents
or newly elected presidents who won by large margins. The
purchasing power of the U.S. dollar has fallen 94 percent in the past
100 years. The only way you can create inflation is by creating more
money that is backed by the same reserve assets; the Fed is the only
entity that can create more money. Ben Bernanke's quantitative easing
(QE) programs have pumped billions of unfunded dollars into the
economy, thereby setting us up for massive inflation in the very near
future. If this isn't a form of financial terrorism, it is incompetence of the highest order. — Ziad K. Abdelnour

I was Chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City. As you know, there are twelve banks and they have their citizens board, and I got elected to the Fed Chairmanship for the Federal Reserve Kansas City Bank back in the mid-'90s. It might have been 1995-'96. — Herman Cain

There's no other job in public life that is like chairman of the Fed. — Alan Greenspan