Ben Bernanke

To achieve a more balanced international system over time, countries with excessive and unsustainable trade surpluses will need to allow their exchange rates to better reflect market fundamentals.

The one thing people don't appreciate, I think, is that central banking is not a new development. It's been around for a very long time.

The American people are among the most productive in the world. We have the best technologies. We have great universities. We have entrepreneurs.

As we try to make the financial system safer, we must inevitably confront the problem of moral hazard.

The role of liquidity in systemic events provides yet another reason why, in the future, a more system wide or macroprudential approach to regulation is needed.

Deflation can be particularly dangerous when a financial system is shaky, with household and corporate balance sheets in poor shape and banks undercapitalized and heavily burdened with bad loans.

China is growing very quickly and is clearly becoming an important player in the world economy.

If bankers become overly conservative in response to past lending mistakes - or if examiners force such behavior - it will hurt bankers' own long-term interests and the economy in general.

To the extent that bank panics interfere with normal flows of credit, they may affect the performance of the real economy.

I was a professor at Princeton University. And, in that capacity, I studied for many years the role of financial crisis in the economy.

The downturn following the collapse of Japan's so-called bubble economy of the 1980s was not as severe as the Great Depression.

If you want to understand geology, study earthquakes. If you want to understand the economy, study the Depression.