Over the years, the U.S. economy has shown a remarkable ability to absorb shocks of all kinds, to recover, and to continue to grow. Flexible and efficient markets for labor and capital, an entrepreneurial tradition, and a general willingness to tolerate and even embrace technological and economic change all contribute to this resiliency.

If the financial system has a defect, it is that it reflects and magnifies what we human beings are like. Money amplifies our tendency to overreact, to swing from exuberance when things are going well to deep depression when they go wrong. Booms and busts are products, at root, of our emotional volatility.

It turns out that advancing equal opportunity and economic empowerment is both morally right and good economics. Why? Because discrimination, poverty and ignorance restrict growth. We know that investments in education, infrastructure and scientific and technological research increase growth. They increase good jobs, and they create new wealth for all of us.

Money is not capital in most of the developing countries. It's just cash. Because it lacks the institutional, organizational, managerial forms to turn it into capital.

War can really cause no economic boom, at least not directly, since an increase in wealth never does result from destruction of goods.

The first requisite of a sound monetary system is that it put the least possible power over the quantity or quality of money in the hands of the politicians.