Christina Romer Quotes & Sayings (Page 2)

“I think something that forces financial institutions to write down underwater mortgages, I think, would be a sensible thing to do.”

“A successful argument for a government manufacturing policy has to go beyond the feeling that it's better to produce 'real things' than services. American consumers value health care and haircuts as much as washing machines and hair dryers.”

“The stock market crash in October 1929 didn't destroy a particularly large amount of wealth or make people highly pessimistic. Rather, it made companies and consumers very unsure about future income, and so led them to stop spending as they waited for more information.”

“If you think about it, candidate Obama, Sen. Obama, was running on sort of long-run economic issues, like restoring prosperity to the middle class, dealing with the perennial problem of health care in the United States. He talked a lot about the budget deficit, about the need to transition to clean energy.”

“Raising the minimum wage, as President Obama proposed in his State of the Union address, tends to be more popular with the general public than with economists.”

“Fewer people working means permanently lower tax revenues.”

“Making labor less expensive helps firms hire people.”

“I think where I differ a little bit, we absolutely have to think about the deficit looking down the road. And certainly that's something the president has said that we need to, as the economy recovers, have a plan in place for getting it down.”

“If every other store in town is paying workers $9 an hour, one offering $8 will find it hard to hire anyone - perhaps not when unemployment is high, but certainly in normal times. Robust competition is a powerful force helping to ensure that workers are paid what they contribute to their employers' bottom lines.”

“Cold-turkey deficit reduction would cause a significant recession. A recent analysis by the Congressional Budget Office estimated that going headlong over the cliff would cause our gross domestic product, which has been growing at an annual rate of around 2 percent, to fall at a rate of 2.9 percent in the first half of 2013.”