Top 149 Quotes & Sayings by Janet Yellen - Page 3

The pace of increases in labor compensation provides another possible indicator, albeit an imperfect one, of the degree of labor market slack.

Stronger productivity growth would tend to raise the average level of interest rates and, therefore, would provide the Federal Reserve with greater scope to ease monetary policy in the event of a recession.

Monetary policy will, as always, respond to the economy's twists and turns so as to promote, as best as we can in an uncertain economic environment, the employment and inflation goals.

Are deviations from full employment a social problem? Obviously.

Beyond monetary policy, fiscal policy has traditionally played an important role in dealing with severe economic downturns.

The Federal Reserve's monetary policy objective is to foster maximum employment and price stability. In this regard, a key challenge is to assess just how far the economy now stands from the attainment of its maximum employment goal.

The future path of the federal funds rate is necessarily uncertain because economic activity and inflation will likely evolve in unexpected ways. For example, no one can be certain about the pace at which economic headwinds will fade. More generally, the economy will inevitably be buffeted by shocks that cannot be foreseen.

Policy makers should be compelled to take action given the serious costs of long-term unemployment when overall unemployment is already high. A week of unemployment is worse when it is experienced as part of a longer spell.

A pickup in demand in many advanced economies and a stabilization in commodity prices should, in turn, boost the growth prospects of emerging market economies.

Financial market participants appear to recognize the FOMC's data-dependent approach because incoming data surprises typically induce changes in market expectations about the likely future path of policy, resulting in movements in bond yields that act to buffer the economy from shocks.

American workers have faced serious difficulties in the labor market since the first oil shock in 1973. Since that time, the pace of productivity advance has slowed for reasons which are still not understood, lowering the rate at which living standards have advanced.

Private sector labor market flows provide additional indications of the strength of the labor market. For example, the quits rate has tended to be pro-cyclical, since more workers voluntarily quit their jobs when they are more confident about their ability to find new ones and when firms are competing more actively for new hires.

If it were possible to take interest rates into negative territory I would be voting for that.

The average net worth of the lower half of the distribution, representing 62 million households, was $11,000 in 2013. About one-fourth of these families reported zero wealth or negative net worth, and a significant fraction of those said they were "underwater" on their home mortgages, owing more than the value of the home. This $11,000 average is 50 percent lower than the average wealth of the lower half of families in 1989, adjusted for inflation.

The past few decades of widening inequality can be summed up as significant income and wealth gains for those at the very top and stagnant living standards for the majority.

I think it is appropriate to ask whether this trend is compatible with values rooted in our nation's history, among them the high value Americans have traditionally placed on equality of opportunity.

Strapped by tight credit and plummeting sales, businesses have overhauled the way they manage supply chains, inventory, production practices, and staffing.

After adjusting for inflation, the average income of the top 5% of households grew by 38% from 1989 to 2013. ?By comparison, the average real income of the other 95% of households grew less than 10%.

The distribution of wealth is even more unequal than that of income. ...The wealthiest 5% of American households held 54% of all wealth reported in the 1989 survey. Their share rose to 61% in 2010 and reached 63% in 2013. By contrast, the rest of those in the top half of the wealth distribution ?families that in 2013 had a net worth between $81,000 and $1.9 million ?held 43% of wealth in 1989 and only 36% in 2013.

For my own part, I did not see and did not appreciate what the risks were with securitization, the credit ratings agencies, the shadow banking system, the S.I.V.’s — I didn’t see any of that coming until it happened.

[A] major source of wealth for many families is financial assets, including stocks, bonds, mutual funds, and private pensions. ...the wealthiest 5 percent of households held nearly two-thirds of all such assets in 2013

Will capitalist economies operate at full employment in the absence of routine intervention? Certainly not.

The bottom line for housing is that the concerns we used to hear about the possibility of a devastating collapse—one that might be big enough to cause a recession in the U.S. economy—while not fully allayed have diminished. Moreover, while the future for housing activity remains uncertain, I think there is a reasonable chance that housing is in the process of stabilizing, which would mean that it would put a considerably smaller drag on the economy going forward.

Prospects for growth in the year ahead are solid at the national level, and of course, this can only be good news for the Bay Area and California as well. The U. S. economy has shown remarkable resilience in the face of some severe shocks - in particular, the surge in energy prices that began a couple of years ago and the devastation wrought by the twin hurricanes last summer.

Listening to others, especially those with whom we disagree, tests our own ideas and beliefs. It forces us to recognize, with humility, that we don't have a monopoly on the truth.

I would be strongly committed to working with the FOMC to continue promoting a robust economic recovery ... I consider it imperative that we do what we can to promote a very strong recovery.

We do not interpret bitcoin's popularity as having a relationship with the public's view of the Federal Reserve's conduct of monetary policy

By some estimates, income and wealth inequality are near their highest levels in the past hundred years, much higher than the average during that time span and probably higher than for much of American history before then.

The lower half of households by wealth held just 3% of wealth in 1989 and only 1% in 2013.