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Macroeconomics Quotes

Browse 54 quotes about Macroeconomics.

Macroeconomics Quotes

“One recurrent question relates to the conditions required to make governments implement an employment guarantee programme? How high would the unemployment rate have to be? How high would poverty have to be? And the answer in Argentina: until the protests were unbearable! When this happened, policymakers worked with real urgency to solve the problem.”

PovertyEconomicsEmploymentMacroeconomics
Book:Modern Monetary Theory: Key Insights, Leading Thinkers
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“Inequalities at the bottom of the US wage distribution have closely followed the evolution of thee minimum wage: the gap between the bottom 10 percent of the wage distribution and the overall average wage widened significantly in the 1980s, then narrowed in the 1990s, and finally increased again in the 2000s. Nevertheless, inequalities at the top of the distribution - for example, the share of total wages going to the top 10 percent -- increased steadily throughout this period. Clearly, the minimum wage has an impact at the bottom of the distribution but much less influence at the top, where other forces are at work.”

IncomeInequalityDistributionMinimum WageMacroeconomicsGapWage
Book:Capital in the Twenty First Century
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“People do not necessarily know what they are doing, because our ability to comprehend even matters that concern us directly is limited – or, in the jargon, we have ‘bounded rationality’. The world is very complex and our ability to deal with it is severely limited. Therefore, we need to, and usually do, deliberately restrict our freedom of choice in order to reduce the complexity of problems we have to face. Often, government regulation works, especially in complex areas like the modern financial market, not because the government has superior knowledge but because it restricts choices and thus the complexity of the problems at hand, thereby reducing the possibility that things may go wrong.”

GovernmentFinancial MarketsMacroeconomics
Author:Chang Ha-Joon
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“governments budgeted anywhere from one-tenth to more than one-half of their economies to fight the pandemic. No taxpayers were called upon to foot the bill, no creditors were asked to lend them money. Governments voted for the budgets they considered to be necessary and their central banks made the payments. The size of the response was all the evidence one needed to grasp the monetary reality. Governments which issue and control their own currencies face no financing constraints and no threat of insolvency or default.”

PoliticsEconomicsCovid 19MacroeconomicsGovernment Spemding
Book:Modern Monetary Theory: Key Insights, Leading Thinkers
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“A half century of neoliberalism has brought the world to the brink of collapse. Only concerted effort and cooperation by the world’s governments provides any chance of survival. Understanding MMT does not make this easy. But it helps us to recognize what the true constraints are: resources, initiative, politics, imagination.”

PoliticsEconomicsMacroeconomics
Book:Modern Monetary Theory: Key Insights, Leading Thinkers
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“Nations do not exist in isolation. Peoples have always roamed the globe in search of different opportunities. Nations principally trade to expand their consumption possibilities. In a world where we produce to consume, receiving goods and services is better in material terms than sending them elsewhere.”

EconomicsTradeImportsMacroeconomicsExportsExternal Economy
Book:Modern Monetary Theory: Key Insights, Leading Thinkers
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“The multilateral institutions that were introduced in the Post World War II period to coordinate international aid – the IMF and the World Bank – have failed in their respective missions. They became agents for the ‘free market’ ideology and through their structural adjustment packages and related policies have made it harder for a nation to develop.”

EconomicsDeveloping CountriesMacroeconomicsImfWorld BankDeveloping Nations
Book:Modern Monetary Theory: Key Insights, Leading Thinkers
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“A once-and-for-all increase in prices due to low-end workers finally seeing their wages catch up to historical productivity increases is a desired policy outcome, not something to be avoided. Thereafter, the goal would be for wages to stay roughly par with productivity, thereby creating price stability.”

EconomicsEmploymentInflationMacroeconomics
Book:Modern Monetary Theory: Key Insights, Leading Thinkers
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“inflation is a zero-sum game: there are always winners and losers, not just losers. The idea that it is only the latter has been encouraged by neoliberal scholars in order to justify policies that lead to economic contraction every time upward pressure is placed on wages by low unemployment rates.”

EconomicsInflationNeoliberalismMacroeconomics
Book:Modern Monetary Theory: Key Insights, Leading Thinkers
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“MMT recognizes that finance is not a limited resource. It is manufactured and created in the act of spending. In the modern world, the exclusive monopoly to issue the currency endows governments with unparalleled spending power. For MMT, that the issuer can spend without technical constraints is a rather trivial observation. What MMT stresses is that taxes and borrowing cannot pre-fund the issuer of the currency, as the currency must be provided before it can be used for tax collections or bond purchases. The substantive question for MMT then is how to deploy this spending power for achieving the two central macroeconomic goals: full employment and price stability.”

EconomicsMacroeconomicsTax
Book:Modern Monetary Theory: Key Insights, Leading Thinkers
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“Excerpt from page 113 [On Malaysia's Prime Minster's anti-capitalism and anti-globalization policies in September 1997] "Ah, excuse me, Mahathir, but what planet are you living on? You talk about participating in globalization as if it were a choice you had. Globalization isn't a choice. It's a reality. There is just one global market today, and the only way you can grown at the speed your people want to grow is by tapping into the global stock and bond markets, by seeking out multinationals to invest in your country and by selling into the global trading systems what your factories produce. And the most basic truth about globalization is: No one is in charge. You keep looking for someone to complain to, someone to take the heat off your markets, someone to blame. Well, guess what, Mahathir, there's no one on the other end of the phone!" "The Electronic Heard cuts no one any slack... The herd is not infallible. It makes mistakes too. It overreacts and it overshoots. But if your fundamentals are basically sound, the herd will eventually recognize this and come back. They herd is never stupid for too long. In the end, it always responds to good governance and good economic management.”

CapitalismGlobalizationGovernanceMacroeconomics
Book:The Lexus and the Olive Tree
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“Economics also has to become a fundamentally monetary discipline—from the consideration of how individuals make market decisions through to our understanding of macroeconomics. The myth of "the money illusion" (which can only be true in a world without debt) has to be immediately dispelled, while our macroeconomics have to reflect a monetary economy in which nominal magnitudes matter, precisely because they are the link between the value of current output and the financing of accumulated debt. The dangers of excessive debt and deflation simply cannot be comprehended from a neoclassical perspective. The discipline must also become fundamentally empirical, in contrast to the faux empiricism of econometrics. By this I mean basing itself on the economic and financial data first and foremost—the collection and interpretation of which has been the hallmark of contributions by econophysicists—and by respecting economic history, a topic which has been systematically expunged from economics departments around the world.”

EconomicsMacroeconomics2009Neoclassical EconomicsEconometricsEconophysics
Book:Adbusters #84 Pop Nihilism
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“We're living in a Dark Age of macroeconomics. Remember, what defined the Dark Ages wasn’t the fact that they were primitive — the Bronze Age was primitive, too. What made the Dark Ages dark was the fact that so much knowledge had been lost, that so much known to the Greeks and Romans had been forgotten by the barbarian kingdoms that followed.”

MadeFactsAgeRememberLostDarkKnownForgottenKingdomsDefinedGreekPrimitiveDark AgesBarbariansBronzeMacroeconomics
Author:Paul Krugman
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“Gore Vidal, the American writer, once described the American economic system as 'free enterprise for the poor and socialism for the rich'. Macroeconomic policy on the global scale is a bit like that. It is Keynesianism for the rich countries and monetarism for the poor.”

CountryBitsPoorRichEconomicPolicyScalesSocialismEnterpriseGoreEconomic SystemsFree EnterpriseAmerican WriterRich CountriesMacroeconomicsKeynesianism
Book:Bad Samaritans: rich nations, poor policies, and the threat to the developing world
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“Listen to the women. Women say exactly what they want. Who has concrete plans - not macroeconomics but kitchen table economics. Who will change the situation for their families, and help restore the middle class. Women are also sick to death of having their bodies and their lives treated as a political football.”

WantHelpingBodyPoliticalSituationClassPlansMiddleFootballEconomicsSickTablesTreatedKitchenMiddle ClassConcreteMen WomenKitchen TableSo SickMacroeconomics
Author:Celinda Lake
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“Trying to avert foreclosures, once you can't just force the banks to do it as a condition of getting aid, means that you have to put some public money into it or you have to do other things that are politically unpopular. From the macroeconomic standpoint there is overwhelming need to help people reduce what they owe so that we don't get the foreclosures and we don't get people kicked out of their homes. On the other hand, there is great resistance politically to helping people, not all of whom would be worth recipients of the help.”

PeopleNeedsTryingMeanHelpingHomeHandsWould BeForceConditionsAidsResistanceOverwhelmingHelping PeopleStandpointAvertMacroeconomicsPublic MoneyForeclosure
Author:Barney Frank
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“If one sentence were to sum up the mechanism driving the Great Stagnation, it is this: Recent and current innovation is more geared to private goods than to public goods. That simple observation ties together the three major macroeconomic events of our time: growing income inequality, stagnant median income, and the financial crisis.”

IfsTogetherThreeSimpleGrowingEventsMajorsInnovationCrisisFinancialCurrentsSentencesDrivingIncomeObservationInequalityTiesOur TimeGoodsMechanismStagnationStagnantFinancial CrisisIncome InequalityOne SentenceMacroeconomicsMedian
Author:Tyler Cowen
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“Macroeconomic stability will be more elusive and that will affect all of our lives: from the risks many will face in childhood, to the security of employment at working age, to the challenge of accumulating for retirement. More financial instability will introduce more uncertainty all down the line, and that will be a very different world than the one we would have lived in only a couple of decades ago.”

WorldDifferentAgeFacesChallengesLinesOur LivesRiskChildhoodSecurityCoupleFinancialDecadesEmploymentUncertaintyRetirementStabilityIntroducingElusiveDifferent WorldsInstabilityMacroeconomics
Author:Alan M. Taylor
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“It should be possible to emphasize to students that the level of employment is a macroeconomic issue, depending in the short run on aggregate demand and depending in the long run on the natural rate of unemployment, with microeconomic policies like tariffs having little net effect. Trade policy should be debated in terms of its impact on efficiency, not in terms of phoney numbers about jobs created or lost.”

ShouldLittlesLongPhilosophyRunningJobsPoliticalLostTermNaturalLevelsNumbersIssuesEffectsPolicyStudentsDemandEconomicsTradeImpactRateEmploymentLong RunsEfficiencyUnemploymentTariffsMacroeconomicsMicroeconomics
Author:Paul Krugman
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“There's no denying that a collapse in stock prices today would pose serious macroeconomic challenges for the United States. Consumer spending would slow, and the U.S. economy would become less of a magnet for foreign investors. Economic growth, which in any case has recently been at unsustainable levels, would decline somewhat. History proves, however, that a smart central bank can protect the economy and the financial sector from the nastier side effects of a stock market collapse.”

StatesTodaySidesGrowthChallengesLevelsUnitedCasesUnited StatesEconomyEconomicEffectsSeriousProtectProveSmartEconomicsFinancialSpendingFinanceConsumersInvestorsDeclineCollapseEconomic GrowthMagnetSide EffectsCentral BanksMacroeconomicsStock Price
Author:Ben Bernanke
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