“The ongoing task of debt management for the federal government will clearly be very different in the years ahead than it has been in the past, when debt was rapidly increasing, ... With $3.6 trillion in debt outstanding, even a 3 basis point (0.03 percentage point) reduction in federal borrowing costs will ultimately produce savings of more than $1 billion per year.”
“The IMF needs to focus on the fact that it and all of us in government are alongside what are now vast private markets, ... Our role needs to be (to) support rather than supplant those private markets and to try to create a framework in which the flow of private capital will be stable.”
“The essence of understanding capitalism is to recognize that the interest is not in the survival of particular capitalists, but of the system of capitalism. The most sclerotic economies are those where there never are any shakeouts; there never is any competitive pressure where failure is not a possibility. While shakeouts are painful, they set the stage for redeployment of resources for more productive uses in the future.”
“U.S. budget and current account deficits are very important contributors to an unbalanced global economy, while the U.S. deficit has been a source of demand that has propelled the global economy forward for some years now.”
“What is happening in India and China... The integration of the four-fifths of the world where people are poor with the one fifth of the world where people are rich, has the potential to be one of the three most important economic events in the last millennium, alongside the Renaissance and the Industrial Revolution.”
