The more guidance a central bank can provide the public about how policy is likely to evolve the greater the chance that market participants will make appropriate inferences.

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

I think one of the lessons of the Depression - and this is something that Franklin Roosevelt demonstrated - was that when orthodoxy fails, then you need to try new things. And he was very willing to try unorthodox approaches when the orthodox approach had shown that it was not adequate.

Nobody likes to fail but failure is an essential part of life and of learning. If your uniform isn't dirty, you haven't been in the game.

A gold standard doesn't imply stability in the prices of the goods and services that people buy every day, it implies a stability in the price of gold itself.

Inflation is certainly low and stable and, measured in unemployment and labour-market slack, the economy has made a lot of progress. The pace of growth is disappointingly slow, mostly because productivity growth has been very slow, which is not really something amenable to monetary policy. It comes from changes in technology, changes in worker skills and a variety of other things, but not monetary policy, in particular.

The best approach here, if at all possible, is to use supervisory and regulatory methods to restrain undue risk-taking and to make sure the system is resilient in case an asset-price bubble bursts in the future.