Although this crisis in some ways started in the United States, it is a global crisis. We bear a substantial share of the responsibility for what has happened, but factors that made the crisis so acute and so difficult to contain lie in a broader set of global forces that built up in the years before the start of our current troubles.
Most consequential choices involve shades of gray, and some fog is often useful in getting things done.
Monetary policy itself cannot sensibly be directed at reducing imbalances.
Looking past the immediate crisis, a more resilient system must be built on stronger and better designed shock absorbers, both in the major institutions and in the infrastructure of the financial system.
It is very important for people to understand that the United States of America and no country around the world can devalue its way to prosperity, to be competitive. It is not a viable, feasible strategy, and we will not engage in it.
In the financial system we have today, with less risk concentrated in banks, the probability of systemic financial crises may be lower than in traditional bank-centered financial systems.
I think we're not going to preserve Fannie and Freddie in anything like their current form. We're going to have to bring fundamental change to that market.
Financial crises require governments.
Never before in modern times has so much of the world been simultaneously hit by a confluence of economic and financial turmoil such as we are now living through.
But what we're determined to do, and what the reforms will do is to make sure this system goes back to its core purpose of taking the savings of Americans and from investors around the world and allocating those to people with an idea, not just the largest companies in the country, but to small businesses with an idea and a plan for growing.
This crisis is not simply a more severe version of the usual business cycle recession, the typical downturn in which economies ultimately adjust and stabilize.
As financial markets continue to broaden and deepen, the behavior of asset prices will play an important role in the formulation of monetary policy going forward, perhaps a more important role than in the past.
And I think it's a prudent, responsible way, given the scale of the emergency, the scale of the damage still facing America, that we finance these additional support for the unemployed as well as the support for small business. We think there's a good case for doing it now. We want to do it in an overall fiscally responsible way.
I personally believe that there's going to be a good case for the government preserving some type of guarantee to make sure that people have the ability to borrow to finance a house even in a very damaging recession. I think there's going to be a good case for that.
Some think that by preparing to deal with crises you make them more likely. I think the wiser judgment is the contrary. In this area at least, if you want peace or stability, it's better to prepare for war or instability.