I love facts and figures. It's like following a detective story, piecing together what's going on in the economy.

If prices go down, we will have problems - problems in the sense of spillover to other areas.

How do we know when irrational exuberance has unduly escalated asset values?

Before I met Ayn Rand, I was a logical positivist, and accordingly, I didn't believe in absolutes, moral or otherwise. If I couldn't prove a proposition with facts and figures, it was without merit.

Given our inevitably incomplete knowledge about key structural aspects of our ever-changing economy and the sometimes asymmetric costs or benefits of particular outcomes, a central bank... need to consider not only the most likely future path for the economy but also the distribution of possible outcomes about that path. They then need to reach a judgment about the probabilities, costs, and benefits of the various possible outcomes under alternative choices for policy.

Institutions of the newer participants in global finance had not been tested, until recently...recent crisis have underscored certain financial structure vulnerabilities that are not readily assuaged in the short run.

What we have found over the years in the marketplace is that derivatives have been an extraordinarily useful vehicle to transfer risk from those who shouldn't be taking it to those who are willing to and are capable of doing so.