Quotes about inflation (230 quotes, page 3)

“Are you still convinced that inflation is incompatible with economic success?”

Ha-Joon Chang book Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism

Source: Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism (2008), Ch. 7: 'Mission impossible?; Can financial prudence go too far?', There is inflation and there is inflation, p. 149
Context: Inflation is bad for growth—this has become one of the most widely accepted economic nostrums of our age. But see how you feel about it after digesting the following piece of information.
During the 1960s and the 1970s, Brazil's average inflation rate was 42% a year. Despite this, Brazil was one of the fastest growing economies in the world for those two decades—its per capita income grew at 4.5% a year during this period. In contrast, between 1996 and 2005, during which time Brazil embraced the neo-liberal orthodoxy, especially in relation to macroeconomic policy, its inflation rate averaged a much lower 7.1% a year. But during this period, per capita income in Brazil grew at only 1.3% a year.
If you are not entirely persuaded by the Brazilian case—understandable, given that hyperinflation went side by side with low growth in the 1980s and the early 1990s—how about this? During its 'miracle' years, when its economy was growing at 7% a year in per capita terms, Korea had inflation rates close to 20%-17.4% in the 1960s and 19.8% in the 1970s. These were rates higher than those found in several Latin American countries... Are you still convinced that inflation is incompatible with economic success?

Success

“It means we cannot afford undue work stoppages, inflated costs of material or talent, wasteful interagency rivalries, or a high turnover of key personnel. New objectives and new money cannot solve these problems. They could in fact, aggravate them further — unless every scientist, every engineer, every serviceman, every technician, contractor, and civil servant gives his personal pledge that this nation will move forward, with the full speed of freedom, in the exciting adventure of space.”

John F. Kennedy (1917–1963) 35th president of the United States of America

1961, Speech to Special Joint Session of Congress
Context: This decision demands a major national commitment of scientific and technical manpower, materiel and facilities, and the possibility of their diversion from other important activities where they are already thinly spread. It means a degree of dedication, organization and discipline which have not always characterized our research and development efforts. It means we cannot afford undue work stoppages, inflated costs of material or talent, wasteful interagency rivalries, or a high turnover of key personnel. New objectives and new money cannot solve these problems. They could in fact, aggravate them further — unless every scientist, every engineer, every serviceman, every technician, contractor, and civil servant gives his personal pledge that this nation will move forward, with the full speed of freedom, in the exciting adventure of space.

Money , Problem , Freedom , Personality

“As regards currency inflation, Turgot saw that”

Andrew Dickson White (1832–1918) American politician

Source: Seven Great Statesmen in the Warfare of Humanity with Unreason (1915), p. 170-171
Context: Turgot's attempt... showed how the results that had followed Law's issues of paper money must follow all such issues. As regards currency inflation, Turgot saw that the issue of paper money beyond the point where it is convertible into coin is the beginning of disaster—that a standard of value must have value, just as a standard of length must have length, or a standard of capacity, capacity, or a standard of weight, weight. He showed that if a larger amount of the circulating medium is issued than is called for by the business of the country, it will begin to be discredited, and that paper, if its issue be not controlled by its relation to some real standard of value, inevitably depreciates no matter what stamp it bears. Turgot developed his argument [on currency inflation] with a depth, strength, clearness, and breadth, which have amazed every dispassionate reader from that day to this. It still remains one of the best presentations of this subject ever made; and what adds to our wonder is that it was not the result of a study of authorities, but was worked out wholly from his own observation and thought. Up to this time there were no authorities and no received doctrine on the subject; there were simply records of financial practice more or less vicious; it was reserved for this young student, in a letter not intended for publication, to lay down for the first time the great law in which the modern world, after all its puzzling and costly experiences, has found safety.

“By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens.”

John Maynard Keynes book The Economic Consequences of the Peace

Source: The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919), Chapter VI, pp. 235-236
Context: Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the capitalist system was to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. By this method they not only confiscate, but they confiscate arbitrarily; and, while the process impoverishes many, it actually enriches some. The sight of this arbitrary rearrangement of riches strikes not only at security, but at confidence in the equity of the existing distribution of wealth. Those to whom the system brings windfalls, beyond their deserts and even beyond their expectations or desires, become 'profiteers,' who are the object of the hatred of the bourgeoisie, whom the inflationism has impoverished, not less than of the proletariat. As the inflation proceeds and the real value of the currency fluctuates wildly from month to month, all permanent relations between debtors and creditors, which form the ultimate foundation of capitalism, become so utterly disordered as to be almost meaningless; and the process of wealth-getting degenerates into a gamble and a lottery.
Lenin was certainly right. There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose.

Parting , Wealth

“The well-being of the British people and the health of our economy are far more important than any government's commitment to a particular strategy, but to change course now would be fatal to the whole counter-inflation strategy.”

Geoffrey Howe (1926–2015) British Conservative politician

"Chancellor determined not to change course in the fight against inflation", The Times, 11 March 1981, p. 6.
1981 budget speech.

People , Health , Change

“If inflation priced us out of world markets we should be back in the old nightmare of unemployment. What folly to risk throwing away all that we have gained. ... Our first duty at a time when there is more money about than goods to spend it on is to keep down Government expenditure. ... The second duty of the Government is to frame policies which encourage saving and discourage spending. ... in the long run there is only one answer to the 64,000 dollar question—to increase production. That is the answer. That is where the real hope lies.”

Harold Macmillan (1894–1986) British politician

Speech at Bedford (20 July 1957), quoted in "More production 'the only answer' to inflation", The Times (22 July 1957), p. 4
Prime Minister

Money , Time , Question , Hope

“Indeed, let us be frank about it. Most of our people have never had it so good. Go around the country, go to the industrial towns, go to the farms, and you will see a state of prosperity such as we have never had in my life time—nor indeed ever in the history of this country. What is beginning to worry some of us is, is it too good to be true?—or perhaps I should say, is it too good to last? ... Our constant concern to-day is, can prices be steadied while at the same time we maintain full employment in an expanding economy? Can we control inflation? This is the problem of our time.”

Harold Macmillan (1894–1986) British politician

Speech at Bedford (20 July 1957), quoted in "More production 'the only answer' to inflation", The Times (22 July 1957), p. 4
Prime Minister

Time , History , Country , People

“Like it or not, one of the most spectacular events of our age is the comparative success of the Communist economic systems. … Do you seriously imagine that there is no challenge from the Communist States on this level? And who do you think will win the contest if we stumble on as we are—the Communist States, which are not afraid of full production, or the Western States, which have still never achieved for any considerable period full production and full employment without inflation? Yes, who will win—the Communist States, who are turning out trained technicians at an unexampled pace, or the Western powers, who contentedly spend more on advertising than education?”

Michael Foot (1913–2010) British politician

'Up The Garden', The Spectator (22 January 1960), pp. 8–9
1960s

Imagination , Success , Thinking , Age

“Right now, the average worker in America is making, in inflation-accounted-for dollars, and despite a huge increase in technology and worker productivity, exactly the same amount of money that he or she made 43 years ago. That’s incomprehensible.”

Bernie Sanders (1941) American politician, senator for Vermont

2010s, 2019, June 2019

Money , Making love

“Let there be no doubt that our present rate of inflation is the main cause of our economic difficulties. There never has been a more mistaken piece of economic analysis than the view that we should accept inflation to avoid unemployment. Inflation today, so far from being an alternative to unemployment, is its main cause. If our rate of cost increase is allowed to continue close to twice that of the average for the developed world it will increasingly price us out of world markets. Employers…will have to restrict their activities and still more their labour force in response to mounting and uncontainable wage and salary bills.”

Roy Jenkins (1920–2003) British politician, historian and writer

Hugh Anderson Memorial lecture at the Cambridge Union (28 February 1975), quoted in The Times (1 March 1975), p. 2
1970s

World

“Inflation in Britain is at an unacceptable level. It is now mostly home-induced and wage-induced. It is moving well out of line with that of the rest of the world. If it goes on doing so it will ruin us as a nation, both economically and politically. It is of a different order from any of our other difficulties. It is, quite simply, our biggest menace since Hitler.”

Roy Jenkins (1920–2003) British politician, historian and writer

Hugh Anderson Memorial lecture at the Cambridge Union (28 February 1975), quoted in The Times (1 March 1975), p. 2
1970s

World , Home

“It was better to have a somewhat harsh Budget, which would cure inflation, rather than a generous, popular Budget which would merely undermine the purchasing power of the pound.”

Roy Jenkins (1920–2003) British politician, historian and writer

Maiden speech https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1970/apr/20/budget-resolutions-and-economic-situation#column_83 in the House of Commons (3 June 1948)
1940s

“We used to think that you could spend your way out of a recession and increase employment by cutting taxes and boosting government spending. I tell you in all candour that that option no longer exists, and in so far as it ever did exist, it only worked on each occasion since the war by injecting a bigger dose of inflation into the economy, followed by a higher level of unemployment as the next step. Higher inflation followed by higher unemployment. We have just escaped from the highest rate of inflation this country has known; we have not yet escaped from the consequences: high unemployment. That is the history of the last twenty years.”

James Callaghan (1912–2005) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom; 1976-1979

Speech to the Labour Party Conference in Blackpool (28 September 1976), quoted in Labour Party Annual Conference Report 1976, p. 188 and James Callaghan, Time and Chance (Collins, 1987), p. 426. This part of his speech was written by his son-in-law, future BBC Economics correspondent Peter Jay
Prime Minister

History , Country , War , Thinking

“You know, as I do, that we face two deep-seated problems, inflation and unemployment. Both of them are still too high. … I have to emphasize to you that if we fail to bring down inflation, we shall never succeed in overcoming unemployment. We cannot have a prosperous industry in this country if we are unable to sell our goods overseas. No one owes Britain a living, and may I say to you quite bluntly that despite the measures of the last 12 months, we are still not earning the standard of living we are enjoying. We are only keeping up our standards by borrowing, and this cannot go on indefinitely. There is no soft option. I do not promise you any real easement for some time to come. There can be no lasting improvement in your own living standards until we can achieve it without going deeper and deeper into debt as a nation.”

James Callaghan (1912–2005) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom; 1976-1979

First television broadcast as Prime Minister (5 April 1976), quoted in The Times (6 April 1976), pp. 1–2
Prime Minister

Problem , Time , Country

“The power structure in Britain is changing. Authority is no longer obeyed for its own sake. There are severe limits on what government can do, so the way to win the battle against inflation and unemployment is not to try to dragoon the country. If we do we shall fail. We must secure its consent. We are playing for high stakes. In a real sense, adherence to the social contract puts on trial whether our society has the will and determination to solve its problems by democratic means.”

James Callaghan (1912–2005) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom; 1976-1979

Speech to the Labour Party Conference in London (27 November 1974), quoted in The Times (28 November 1974), p. 6
Foreign Secretary

Country , Problem , Sense , Way

“The vacua with positive cosmological constant trap the universe in eternal inflation. They decay only locally, by producing bubbles of new vacua. Thus, every vacuum in the landscape will be realized an infinite number of times in different, causally disconnected regions. Each bubble expands to become an infinite open universe embedded in the global spacetime.”

Raphael Bousso (1971) American physicist

"Holographic probabilities in eternal inflation." Physical review letters 97, no. 19 (2006): 191302. arXiv preprint https://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0605263

Universe , Time

“Incidentally, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) Governor, Raghuram Rajan, has single-handedly brought a huge slowdown to the Indian manufacturing sector and exports. As a doctor, he has believed that the best way to bring down the temperature of a patient (i. e., inflation) is to kill him (investment starvation).”

Raghuram G. Rajan (1963) Indian economist

Subramanian Swamy, politician and economist, as quoted in " The way out of the economic tailspin http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/lead/the-way-out-of-the-economic-tailspin/article7662610.ece", The Hindu (18 September 2015)

Way

“This option the consumer retains of being able to buy security wherever he pleases brings about a constant emulation among all the producers, each producer striving to maintain or augment his clientele with the attraction of cheapness or of faster, more complete and better justice.If, on the contrary, the consumer is not free to buy security wherever he pleases, you forthwith see open up a large profession dedicated to arbitrariness and bad management. Justice becomes slow and costly, the police vexatious, individual liberty is no longer respected, the price of security is abusively inflated and inequitably apportioned, according to the power and influence of this or that class of consumers. The protectors engage in bitter struggles to wrest customers from one another. In a word, all the abuses inherent in monopoly or in communism crop up.”

Gustave de Molinari (1819–1912) Belgian political economist and classical liberal theorist

Source: The Production of Security (1849), p. 57-59

Bad luck , Justice , Communication

“Your task is the following: After any kind of success, analyze the components. See the element of luck that is inevitably there, as well as the role that other people, including mentors, played in your good fortune. This will neutralize the tendency to inflate your powers. Remind yourself that with success comes complacency, as attention becomes more important than the work and old strategies are repeated.”

Robert Greene (1959) American author

Chap. 11 : Know Your Limits
The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

Bad luck , People , Success

“I refuse to start from the assumption that the role of monetary policy is to control and stabilize inflation. The only acceptable way to start is, I believe, to think of the goal of monetary policy, together with fiscal policy,as the maximization of welfare.”

Olivier Blanchard (1948) French economist

" Monetary Policy; Science or Art? https://economics.mit.edu/files/742" (2006)

Way , Thinking

“Histories based on biographies can present a one-dimensional image of the architects involved, often inflating what was a portion of their existence, interests or social and cultural significance, making architecture appear to be their driving force when in reality it may have been merely one of several interests.”

Dana Arnold (1961) Middlessex uni prof

Source: Reading Architectural History (2002), Ch. 2 : The authority of the author : Biography and the reconstruction of the canon

Reality , Appearance , Making love , History

“The problem of policies aimed to return the economy to what it was before the virus hit is this: Global capitalism, by 2019, was itself a major cause of the collapse in 2020. Capitalism's scars from the crashes of 2000 and 2008-2009 had not healed. Years of low interest rates had enabled corporations and governments to "solve" all their problems by borrowing limitlessly at almost zero interest rate cost. All the new money pumped into economies by central banks had indeed caused the feared inflation, but chiefly in stock markets whose prices consequently spiraled dangerously far away from underlying economic values and realities. Inequalities of income and wealth reached historic highs. In short, capitalism had built up vulnerabilities to another crash that any number of possible triggers could unleash. The trigger this time was not the dot.com meltdown of 2000 or the sub-prime meltdown of 2008/9; it was a virus. And of course, mainstream ideology requires focusing on the trigger, not the vulnerability. Thus mainstream policies aim to reestablish pre-virus capitalism. Even if they succeed, that will return us to a capitalist system whose accumulated vulnerabilities will soon again collapse from yet another trigger.”

Richard D. Wolff (1942) American economist

COVID-19 and the Failures of Capitalism (2020)

Money , Time , Wealth , Problem

“Too large a tax cut, of course, could result in inflation and insufficient future revenues--but the greatest danger is a tax cut too little or too late to be effective.”

John F. Kennedy (1917–1963) 35th president of the United States of America

Source: 1962, Address and Question and Answer Period at the Economic Club of New York

Future

“Legislatures have rewritten basic business laws, some whose principles date back thousands of years. Too often the goal has been to thwart competition, artificially inflate prices, hold down wages by decimating unions, reduce worker benefits and... restrict or bar access to the courts by those aggrieved.”

David Cay Johnston (1948) Investigative journalist and author

The Fine Print (2013)

Business , Law

“It is not, you know, that you lie well, cousin. It’s merely that no one is foolhardy enough to call you on it. This may have given you an inflated idea of your skill at dissimulation.”

Lois McMaster Bujold book The Hallowed Hunt

Source: World of the Five Gods series, The Hallowed Hunt (2005), Chapter 8 (p. 136)

Lie , Idea

“Word inflation is a problem. You can try to change reality by changing the words, but you can’t. It just stops you from dealing with it. One of the bad guys in Nineteen Eighty-Foursays, ‘The whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought.’ It’s Orwellian, and Orwell never ends well.”

Bill Maher (1956) American stand-up comedian

Source: Sen. Chris Coons and Caitlin Flanagan, Natural Immunity, (2021)

Change , Problem , Reality , Guy

“The combination of rising inflation, energy crisis and COVID epidemic makes this (2021) the most difficult year for our citizens since our country came to existence.”

Petr Fiala (1964) Leader of the Civic Democratic Party (ODS)

Source: Petr Fiala (2022) cited in " New Czech centre-right government wins confidence vote in parliament https://www.thestar.com.my/news/world/2022/01/14/new-czech-centre-right-government-wins-confidence-vote-in-parliament" on The Star, 14 January 2022.

Country

“Will the right hon. Lady take the opportunity today and every day to make clear to the country, as only she can, that the courses that are being commended to her by the official Opposition and by many other voices mean nothing but a deliberate return to hyper-inflation?”

Enoch Powell (1912–1998) British politician

Question http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1980/jul/22/prime-minister-engagements#column_267 to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the House of Commons (22 July 1980)
1980s

Country

“I want every American to know that I am taking inflation very seriously and it is my top domestic priority”

Joe Biden (1942) 47th Vice President of the United States (in office from 2009 to 2017)

2022, May 2022
Source: Biden says Fed targeting inflation, China tariffs under review https://www.reuters.com/world/us/biden-blast-republicans-having-no-plan-inflation-2022-05-10/

“We don’t want to be manipulated by right-wing elitist billionaires or by left-wing guys that don’t understand our life on the ground that is living in fear of crime, that is living as a result of inflation that is killing us in many parts of the country. We need gas to go to work.”

Al Sharpton (1954) American Baptist minister, civil rights activist, and television/radio talk show host

“Democratic Outlook for 2022 Midterms” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ea8LKGL0xXo MSNBC (April 11, 2022)

Fear , Guy , Understanding , Country

Quotes about inflation page 3

Quotes about inflation
page 3