Although we work through financial markets, our goal is to help Main Street, not Wall Street.
Janet YellenRead
Long-term unemployment can make any worker progressively less employable, even after the economy strengthens.
Interpretation
Long-term unemployment decreases a worker's chances of being hired, even in a recovering economy.
This quote highlights the detrimental effects of prolonged unemployment on an individual's employability. Janet Yellen emphasizes that not only does the experience of being unemployed take a toll on a person's skills and confidence, but it can also lead to a long-lasting impact on their ability to secure future employment, even when job opportunities increase as the economy recovers.
In practice
In a discussion about job market challenges, one might quote this to illustrate the importance of addressing long-term unemployment.
Although we work through financial markets, our goal is to help Main Street, not Wall Street.
We need to keep in mind the well-established fact that the full effects of monetary policy are felt only after long lags. This means that policy makers cannot wait until they have achieved their objectives to begin adjusting policy.
A clear lesson of history is that a 'sine qua non' for sustained economic recovery following a financial crisis is a thoroughgoing repair of the financial system.
Transparency concerning the Federal Reserve's conduct of monetary policy is desirable because better public understanding enhances the effectiveness of policy. More important, however, is that transparent communications reflect the Federal Reserve's commitment to accountability within our democratic system of government.
For decades, the pace of technological change in manufacturing has outstripped that in the economy as a whole. And, so, firms - manufacturing firms - have found it easier to continue producing by - with - reducing their workforces.
Inequality has risen to the point that it seems to me worthwhile for the U.S. to seriously consider taking the risk of making our economy more rewarding for more of the people.
Automation provides us with wondrous increases of production and information, but does it tell us what to do with the men the machines displace? Modern industry gives us the capacity for unparalleled wealth - but where is our capacity to make that wealth meaningful to the poor of every nation?
All taxes, except a 'lump-sum tax,' introduce distortions in the economy. But no government can impose a lump-sum tax - the same amount for everyone regardless of their income or expenditures - because it would fall heaviest on those with less income, and it would grind the poor, who might be unable to pay it at all.
It is better that a man should tyrannize over his bank balance than over his fellow-citizens and whilst the former is sometimes denounced as being but a means to the latter, sometimes at least it is an alternative.
A policy of subsidizing failures will end in an economy strewn with capital-guzzling industries long past their time of profitability - old companies that cannot create jobs themselves, but can stand in the way of job creation.
There are severe limits to the good that the government can do for the economy, but there are almost no limits to the harm it can do.
THE CORRECTION, when it finally came, was not an overnight bursting of a bubble but a much more gentle letdown, a year-long leakage of value from key financial markets, a contraction too gradual to generate headlines and too predictable to seriously hurt anybody but fools and the working poor.
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