"I know you think you understand what you thought I said but I'm not sure you realize that what you heard is not what I meant"

"People don't realize that we cannot forecast the future. What we can do is have probabilities of what causes what, but that's as far as we go. And I've had a very successful career as a forecaster, starting in 1948 forward. The number of mistakes I have made are just awesome. There is no number large enough to account for that."

"Finance is wholly different from the rest the economy."

"I don't know where the stock market is going, but I will say this, that if it continues higher, this will do more to stimulate the economy than anything we've been talking about today or anything anybody else was talking about."

"Any informed borrower is simply less vulnerable to fraud and abuse."

"I'm a free-market economist from years and years back, and I've never veered from that."

"Increased jobs are the consequence of increased trade. Increasing jobs more than output implies a fall in productivity and standards of living. That surely cannot be our goal."

"If somebody had said to me in June or July of 1987, 'We'd like you to become chairman of the Federal Reserve, but you're never allowed to discuss any economics after you leave,' I'd have said, 'Forget it.' What do they want me to do? Become an anthropologist?'"

"Crony capitalism is essentially a condition in which... public officials are giving favours to people in the private sector in payment of political favours."