John Kenneth Galbraith: Quotes about money

“To pay off the debt was to destroy the money supply.”

John Kenneth Galbraith

Source: Money: Whence It Came, Where It Went (1975), Chapter VIII, The Great Compromise, p. 90
Context: In numerous years following the war the Federal government ran a heavy surplus. It could not pay off it's debt, retire its securities, because to do so meant there would be no bonds to back the national bank notes. To pay off the debt was to destroy the money supply.

Money

“Money is a singular thing. It ranks with love as man's greatest source of joy. And with death as his greatest source of anxiety. Over all history it has oppressed nearly all people in one of two ways: either it has been abundant and very unreliable, or reliable and very scarce.”

John Kenneth Galbraith

Source: The Age of Uncertainty (1977), Chapter 6, p. 161

Love , Death , Money , People

“A constant in the history of money is that every remedy is reliably a source of new abuse.”

John Kenneth Galbraith

Source: Money: Whence It Came, Where It Went (1975), Chapter II, Of Coins and Treasure

Money , History

“The pioneering instrument of reform was the Bank of England. Of all institutions concerned with economics none has for so long enjoyed such prestige. It is, in all respects, to money as St. Peter's is to Faith.”

John Kenneth Galbraith

Source: Money: Whence It Came, Where It Went (1975), Chapter IV, The Bank, p. 30

Money , Faith

“This view that the action of the Federal Reserve authorities in 1927 was responsible for the speculation and collapse which followed has never been seriously shaken. There are reasons why it is attractive. It is simple, and it exonerates both the American people and the economic system from substantial blame… Yet the explanation obviously assumes that people will always speculate if only they can get the money to finance it. Nothing could be farther from the case. There were times before and there has been long periods since when credit was plentiful and cheap -- far cheaper than in 1927-29 -- and when speculation was negligible. Nor was speculation out of control after 1927, except that it was beyond the reach of men who did not want in the least to control it. The explanation is a tribute only to a recurrent preference, in economic matters, for formidable nonsense.”

John Kenneth Galbraith book The Great Crash, 1929

Source: The Great Crash, 1929 (1954 and 1997 https://openlibrary.org/books/OL25728842M/The_Great_Crash_1929), Chapter I, "Vision and Boundless Hope and Optimism" p. 10

Men , Money , People , Time

“Nothing is more portable than rich people and their money”

John Kenneth Galbraith

Attributed without source
Money: Whence It Came, Where It Went (1975)

Money , People

“To a few alarmed observers it seemed as though Wall Street were by way of devouring all the money of the entire world. However, in accordance with the cultural practice, as the summer passed, the sound and responsible spokesmen decried not the increase in brokers' loans, but those who insisted on attaching significance to this trend.”

John Kenneth Galbraith book The Great Crash, 1929

Source: The Great Crash, 1929 (1954 and 1997 https://openlibrary.org/books/OL25728842M/The_Great_Crash_1929), Chapter V, The Twilight of Illusion, Section I, p. 68

Money , World , Way , Summer

“The process by which banks create money is so simple that the mind is repelled.”

John Kenneth Galbraith

Source: Money: Whence It Came, Where It Went (1975), Chapter III, Banks, p. 18

Money

“The huge capacity to purchase submission that goes with any large sum of money, well, this we have. This is a power of which we should all be aware.”

John Kenneth Galbraith

The Ashes of Capitalism and the Ashes of Communism (1986)

Money

“In 1736, Franklin's Pennsylvania Gazette printed an apology for its irregular appearence because its printer was "with the Press, labouring for the publick Good, to make Money more plentiful."”

John Kenneth Galbraith

The press was busy printing money.
Source: Money: Whence It Came, Where It Went (1975), Chapter V, Of Paper, p. 54

Money , Business , Appearance

“That one never need to look beyond the love of money for explanation of human behavior is one of the most jealously guarded simplifications of our culture.”

John Kenneth Galbraith book The New Industrial State

Source: The New Industrial State (1967), Chapter XII, Section 1, p. 142

Love , Money , Behavior

“I was studying agriculture, how to produce better chickens, better cattle, better horses — horses in those days — better fruit, better vegetables. This was in the early years of the Great Depression, and the thoughts crossed my mind that there wasn't a hell of a lot of use producing better crops and better livestock if you couldn't sell them, that the real problem of agriculture was not efficiency in production but the problem of whether you could make money after you produced the stuff. So I shifted from the technical side to, first, the study of agricultural economic issues and then on to economics itself.”

John Kenneth Galbraith

Booknotes interview (1994)

Money , Hell , Problem , Study

“We can safely abandon the doctrine of the eighties, namely that the rich were not working because they had too little money, the poor because they had much.”

John Kenneth Galbraith

The Guardian [UK] (20 November 1991)

Money

“A banker need not be popular; indeed a good banker in a healthy capitalist society should probably be much disliked. People do not wish to trust their money to a hail-fellow-well-met but to a misanthrope who can say no.”

John Kenneth Galbraith book The Great Crash, 1929

Chapter VI https://openlibrary.org/books/OL25728842M/The_Great_Crash_1929, Things Become More Serious, Section IV, p 115
The Great Crash, 1929 (1954 and 1997 https://openlibrary.org/books/OL25728842M/The_Great_Crash_1929)

Money , People

“The values of a society totally preoccupied with making money are not altogether reassuring.”

John Kenneth Galbraith book The Great Crash, 1929

Source: The Great Crash, 1929 (1954 and 1997 https://openlibrary.org/books/OL25728842M/The_Great_Crash_1929), Chapter V, The Twilight of Illusion, Section IV, p. 76

Money

“Let's begin with capitalism, a word that has gone largely out of fashion. The approved reference now is to the market system. This shift minimizes — indeed, deletes — the role of wealth in the economic and social system. And it sheds the adverse connotation going back to Marx. Instead of the owners of capital or their attendants in control, we have the admirably impersonal role of market forces. It would be hard to think of a change in terminology more in the interest of those to whom money accords power. They have now a functional anonymity.”

John Kenneth Galbraith

"Free Market Fraud" http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Economics/FreeMarketFraudGalbraith.html, The Progressive (January 1999)

Money , Fashion , Thinking , Change

“The study of money, above all other fields in economics, is the one in which complexity is used to disguise truth or to evade truth, not to reveal it.”

John Kenneth Galbraith

Source: Money: Whence It Came, Where It Went (1975), Chapter I, Money, p. 5

Money , Truth , Study

“What was needed was a policy that increased the supply of money available for use and then ensured its use. Then the state of trade would have to improve.”

John Kenneth Galbraith

Source: Money: Whence It Came, Where It Went (1975), Chapter XVI, The Coming of J.M. Keynes, p. 217