Quotes About Economics

Why do tax havens exist? Because rich countries allow them to. If the U.S. came down on tax havens in the same way they come down on countries that trade with Iran and Cuba, we'd have no tax havens in the world.

Adam Smith pointed out that there were three things that make us more prosperous, in a general sort of way: freedom to pursue our own self-interest; specialization, which he called division of labor; and freedom of trade.

Mountains and oceans do not furnish any impassable barrier to the extension of trade.

People say free trade causes dislocation. In actual fact, it's the lowering of trade barriers that causes the dislocation.

How can we have 'freer' free trade? Let's get real, for God's sake.

The trade of banks is the buying and selling of interest and exchange.

Although China and United States are competitors, China and the United States are indeed partners in trade.

Economics works great for planning your life when you don't have a work passion, since we tend to assume that your job delivers only money and you trade off job hours with leisure hours. If you think your job will just be a job, pick one that pays well per hour and leaves you some time off, even if the activity of the job is boring.

Hillary Clinton can't tell a good trade deal from bad one.

The Right has focused on expanding economic liberty through tax cuts, free trade, and deregulation.

You can either invade a country or leave them alone and trade with them. When goods cross borders, armies don't.

There is no one trade agreement in the world that has country-specific content. It doesn't exist. Content has to be measured regionally.

Every Republican president starting with Lincoln - and for almost 100 years thereafter - generally supported tariffs, while Democrats tended to promote free trade.

I don't want to stop and build protectionism out there, but I certainly don't mind tough negotiation with our trade partners.

The advantage to Great Britain of a regular free trade in corn would, therefore, be more by raising the rest of the world to our standard and price, than by lowering the prices here to the standard of the Continent.

Likewise, free trade does not, as evidenced in CAFTA, mean fair trade.

To try to correct imbalances with trade restrictions is a grave error.

The biggest trade that Germany and Britain had was with each other, in the prewar period; I think I'm right in that. Two highly industrialized nations had the most trade with each other, and it wasn't tariff policies alone that made trade relations better for both of them.

As I wrote I began to see more strongly that there were inescapable analogies. You couldn't really live through the '80s without feeling how crass and distasteful some of the economic doctrines were. The slave trade is a perfect model for that kind of total devotion to the profit motive without reckoning the human consequences.

While I believe firmly in open markets and free trade, I also believe an open market needs a level playing field.

The adult way to run a business is to run it more like a country. They have disputes, yet they've actually been able to have huge trade with each other. They're not sending bombs at each other.

Trade liberalization can be contagious, and the opening of markets regionally can spark progress multilaterally as well.

When I work with countries struggling to pay for budgets or finance trade deficits, I reflect on how Americans do not spend a moment considering the unique advantages of being able to issue bonds and print money freely.

When you can't lend or trade - and you can't invest with the leverage that juiced returns to support seven- and eight-figure bonuses - how exactly are you going to make money?