Quotes About Economy

We kept saying, 'These banks are out of business.' But the government kept saving the banks," he said. "And right in the midst of this Iceland went broke.

After all, the job market is a market.

Fear and, to a lesser extent, greed are what make money move.

The markets in the long run are no doubt driven by fundamental economic laws—if the United States runs a persistent trade deficit, the dollar will eventually plummet—but in the short run money flows less rationally. Fear and, to a lesser extent, greed are what make money move.

They were less and less able to buy and sell big chunks of stock in a gulp.

The metaphor that Romer used to describe the economy to noneconomists was of a well-stocked kitchen waiting for a brilliant chef to exploit it. Everyone in the kitchen starts with more or less the same ingredients, the metaphor ran, but not everyone produces good food. And only a very few people who wander into the kitchen find entirely new ways to combine old ingredients into delightfully tasty recipes. These people were the wealth creators.

In Greece the banks didn't sink the country. The country sank the banks.

Here, in 2001, entered Goldman Sachs, which engaged in a series of apparently legal but nonetheless repellent deals designed to hide the Greek government's true level of indebtedness. For these trades Goldman Sachs—which, in effect, handed Greece a $1 billion loan—carved out a reported $300 million in fees.

the bond market, because Wall Street was now making even bigger money packaging and selling and shuffling around America's growing debts.

It was widely believed that a small, bald man in a grubby room in Moscow started all rumors to wreak havoc on our Western market-based economy.

The bitterness of Poor Quality remains long after the sweetness of Low Price is Forgotten. From Hemingway Adventure by Michael Palin.

In sum, the myth of a self-reliant, free-market, trickle-down economy is just that, a myth. In almost every enterprise, government provides business with supports, protections, and opportunities for private gain at public expense.

A joke circulating in Russia in 1992 went like this: Q. What did capitalism accomplish in one year that communism could not do in seventy years? A. Make communism look good.

Sure, I hear about the new freedom that people are enjoying in Eastern Europe. But how do you define freedom? Millions of people in Eastern Europe are now free from employment, free from safe streets, free from health care, free from social security

If profits are going up, then the economy is "doing well"—even if the working public is falling behind in real wages and living conditions, as happened during much of 2001–2007.

Aid programs are not intended to effect serious social betterment. At best, they finance piecemeal projects of limited impact. More often, they are used to undermine local markets, drive small farmers off their land, build transportation and office facilities needed by outside investors, increase a country's debt and economic dependency, and further open its economy to multinational corporate penetration. Free Market for the Few

So much about life in a global economy feels as though it has passed beyond the individual's control--what happens to our jobs, to the prices at the gas station, to the vote in the legislature. But somehow food still feels a little different. We can still decide, every day, what we're going to put into our bodies, what sort of food chain we want to participate in. We can, in other words, reject the industrial omelet on offer and decide to eat another.

For as long as the carnival of capitalism lasts, the rules of logic are repealed...

farmers who get the message that consumers care only about price will themselves care only about yield. This is how a cheap food economy reinforces itself.

A successful local food economy implies not only a new kind of food producer, but a new kind of eater as well, one who regards finding, preparing, and preserving food as one of the pleasures of life rather than a chore.

Americans today spend less on food, as a percentage of disposable income (10%), than any other industrialized nation... meaning that we could afford to spend more on food if we chose to.

whenever I hear people say clean food is expensive, I tell them it's actually the cheapest food you can buy. That always gets their attention. Then I explain that with our food all of the costs are figured into the price. Society is not bearing the cost of water pollution, of antibiotic resistance, of food-borne illnesses, of crop subsidies, of subsidized oil and water—of all the hidden costs to the environment and the taxpayer that make cheap food seem cheap.

Consider all we've done on this plant's behalf: allotted it more than 27 million acres of new habitat, assigned 25 million humans to carefully tend it, and bid up its price until it became one of the most precious crops on earth.

Worldwide, the prospects for coffee production in a changing climate are, according to the agronomists, dismal. By one estimate, roughly half the world's coffee-growing acreage—and an even greater proportion in Latin America—will be unable to support the plant by 2050, making coffee one of the crops most immediately endangered by climate change. Capitalism, having benefited enormously from its symbiotic relationship with coffee, now threatens to kill the golden goose.