There is no good way of measuring poverty.

The argument for the free market is a complicated and sophisticated one and depends on demonstration of secondary effects. I have confidence market efficiency will win out.

Socialism, in the traditional sense, meant government ownership and operation of the means of production. Outside of North Korea and a couple of other spots, no one in the world today would define socialism that way. That will never come back.

Germany's problem, in part, is that it went into the euro at the wrong exchange rate that overvalued the deutsche mark.

My monetary studies have led me to the conclusion that central banks could profitably be replaced by computers geared to provide a steady rate of growth in the quantity of money. Fortunately for me personally, and for a select group of fellow economists, that conclusion has had no practical impact… else there would have been no Central Bank of Sweden to have established the award [Nobel Prize] I am honoured to receive.

There are severe limits to the good that the government can do for the economy, but there are almost no limits to the harm it can do.

I say thank God for government waste. If government is doing bad things, it's only the waste that prevents the harm from being greater.