Austan Goolsbee

To the extent that the Trump administration doesn't like a strong dollar, something has got to give, and just yelling at other countries for devaluing when you're raising rates and they're cutting rates is not going to work. ”

I don't believe, the president doesn't believe, that the high income tax cuts work, period. I don't think the evidence supports that. ”

For every criticism of the U.S. economy, whenever people go into a panic, they look around and say, 'That's the cleanest shirt I have. So I'm putting it on.' ”

I believe - I'm not a political expert, but I believe there is a broad consensus, a middle ground if you will, that Democrats and Republicans, business people and workers can agree on, to get this - the economy growing faster, getting people back to work. ”

Cutting taxes for very high income people an average of more than $100,000 a year for people that make more than a million dollars a year is not an effective way to get the economy going. ”

When I was at MIT, they had a beta test of Mosaic, the first popular browser. I remember looking at it, and there was a weather map or something. Now, in fairness to me, there weren't any websites then. But I remember saying, 'This is stupid - what's the point?' Now, of course, it's obvious. ”

In several quarters in the 2000s, if you added up all the private savings of everyone in the United States, it was less than nothing. You can't sustain that as a driver of growth. ”

The data does not support that high-income tax cuts are the main drivers of growth, so I don't think that uncertainty over what the tax rate will be for someone that makes a million dollars a year has that big an impact on the economic growth rate in the country. ”

I'm pretty happy not to be an insider anymore. There's just no common ground. I don't know if it's distrust or that the politics is substantially more partisan than the public. But there's no pressure to make a grand bargain on fiscal matters, on growth, on anything. ”

Giving Northern Europe a veto over Southern Europe's budgets will not hold a monetary union together. The euro zone will continue to need the weaker countries to stomach decades of high unemployment to grind down wages. ”