Lawrence Summers Quotations

In the history of the world, no one has ever washed a rented car.

I promise you that there are a lot of people involved in various kinds of retail activities who think they have a crucial role in the economy, and they're right.

The dramatic modernization of the Asian economies ranks alongside the Renaissance and the Industrial Revolution as one of the most important developments in economic history.

We are inheriting the worst financial system since the Depression. We're inheriting a situation - when people go back and study major banking crises a quarter century from now, the one that America developed in 2007 and 2008 is going to be one of those crises

There are children who are working in textile businesses in Asia who would be prostitutes on the streets if they did not have those jobs

If you look at the history of the American capital market, there's probably no innovation more important than the idea of generally accepted accountancy principles.

It certainly was difficult to sell NAFTA because it's always difficult to sell open markets.

I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to it.

Blaming speculators as a response to financial crisis goes back at least to the Greeks. It's almost always the wrong response.

In politics, as in poetry, it is sometimes true that it is darkest before dawn.

Now is the time for us to strike. We must strengthen our foothold in Asia, to ensure no nation overtakes us.

It says something about this new global economy that USA Today now reports every morning on the day's events in Asian markets.

You can't have a situation in which companies proceed on a permanent basis relying only on cash from the government.

I've always thought that underpopulated countries in Africa are vastly underpolluted.

Start with the idea that you can't repeal the laws of economics. Even if they are inconvenient.

Global capital markets pose the same kinds of problems that jet planes do. They are faster, more comfortable, and they get you where you are going better. But the crashes are much more spectacular.

Contagion has become very much a phenomenon, and it's a phenomenon of globalization.

It was wrong to allow Stalin to shape the European landscape of the 20th century. It would be even more wrong to let him shape the landscape of the 21st century

But ultimately what I was impressed by during my years in government was how much the intellectual climate and the prevailing intellectual notions constrained and represented the universe within which the discourse took place.

The United States basically accepted protection abroad as the price of post-war recovery. Now, that these countries have caught up to our level of prosperity, it is time for them to catch up to our level of openness.

Many children are taught to believe in God. I came to believe in the power of systems analysis.

The availability of private insurance provides tremendous insulation for millions of individuals

Nothing is done until the language is fully reviewed,

If we can do those things, we have a chance to keep this expansion going. But this is not the time to take what (Federal Reserve) Chairman (Alan) Greenspan, what six Nobel prize-winning economists have said would be a very risky course with a massive tax cut. We're not going to let it happen, ... Face The Nation.

Jack Meyer did a great job for Harvard.

Harvard's endowment is critical to the university's academic and financial aid programs and to its capacity for growth, ... the endowment will continue to be overseen and invested with the highest level of professionalism and expertise.

Growing demand and growing markets and networks will tend to reduce costs and raise efficiency, making successful economic management all the more important,

For these three reasons -- national security, how China evolves, our commercial interests -- I believe that this agreement is very much in our national interest.

China has to make a set of adequate commitments to liberalizing its economy -- commitments that are commensurate to the scale of its economy and to the importance of it in the world economy,

He has provided very important and valuable leadership on a range of issues from the Latin American debt crisis in the 1980s to the challenge of the transition economies following the fall of the Berlin Wall to the emerging market challenges of recent years.

He is not only an immensely talented and versatile performer, but also someone who has given a great deal of himself to the university and especially to the vitality of the arts at Harvard,

Our national savings rate is still far too low, driven by a personal savings rate that is not where it should be,

I think the approach we have taken in the administration, of focusing our energies and concerns on the fundamentals and working to strengthen those fundamentals, has been the prudent approach rather than focusing on the stock market,

Today, the IRS operates in a low-trust, short-tether budgeting environment, ... This makes rational planning for capital projects such as information technology very difficult.

We believe the global expansion needs to be balanced up, not balanced down, ... An adjustment should take place in our countries through increased public savings. Internationally, there needs to be an adjustment through an increase in exports rather than reduced imports.

The president has made it very clear that he will not sign any budget measure that doesn't put Social Security and Medicare first, that doesn't take those steps forward (and) certainly any measures that would put at risk the progress we've made in paying down the debt,

The president has set a principle: No bank with an unsatisfactory CRA rating could take advantage of any of the powers granted by this deregulation,

When I first joined the Treasury some years ago, I can assure you we were not thinking about threats to the financial system emanating from viruses, Trojan Horses, logic bombs or malicious code, ... But we are thinking about those things now, and with good reason.

We've seen some indications that there may be some hoarding behavior, but there are many, many factors that influence oil prices, both with respect to the short run and over the medium term, ... But there's no question that -- as in any freely trading market -- there's a psychological element that enters in from time to time.

What we must not do is attack the IRS in order to promote other agendas,

We afford ourselves the best chance of maintaining stability in the highly complex Pacific region by inviting China into the global system rather than keeping it out,

We are considering naming chairs after distinguished Indians. The research center will look at a broad canvas of research on all aspects of India.

The overarching global imperative to work to combat poverty ... must gain added urgency today when HIV-AIDS, conflict and other catastrophes are helping to reverse years of development gains in the poorest countries,

We discussed developments in our exchange and financial markets, ... In this context, we emphasized our view that exchange rates among major currencies should reflect economic fundamentals. We will continue to monitor developments in exchange markets and cooperate as appropriate.

We are not contemplating formal requests from any other country,

We are mindful that we must not take our expansion for granted.

We want to be candid about the need for them to reform their banking system and do more on trade and the like, but the guy (Hashimoto) is also under a lot of pressure right now.

We have been pleased with the market response (to the 10-year indexed notes), ... A liquid market has developed.

There has not been a time in the last century where there has been so much misunderstanding of the US and so much misunderstanding by the US of the world,

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.

Ultimately, we're hoping to expand this further (beyond Boston).

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.

The government has done its part, now it's time that people do their part, ... We have never, in our country, had a moment of economic expansion as strong as the present. So right now it is critical to plan for future.

The success of the India-US relations depends on connections in other fields. The experiences of young people will shape the future of the India-US relations.

These developments create a situation where I think there is more room than there might have been in the past to sit back and analyze what it is that happened, and think best about how in all of our countries we can avoid a recurrence of such problems,

There are issues of intrinsic aptitude ... I would like nothing better than to be proved wrong.

With respect to the action that was taken, it was certainly a constructive step reflecting a careful attempt to respond to pressures that had gathered in the oil sector over time,

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.

There can be no successful economic development without economic growth, ... There have never been greater technological opportunities to promote convergence than there are today.

to take strong steps... to create confidence and to build on the very strong foundation for prosperity that Indonesia enjoys.

Raising personal savings is an imperative for American families and an imperative for the national economy,

The one exception was a technical matter relating to financial modernization: but there Alan simply waited until I left and then very quickly resolved the matter with Larry,

dramatically simplify record keeping for more than 60 million families.

As long as we keep our fundamentals strong...the dollar (and) U.S. borrowing costs will do just fine.

As damaging as these attacks have been, the vast majority were conducted by disgruntled individuals, ... We face a future, though, where criminals, terrorists or even nation-states may use the same tools in a more organized way for darker purposes.

This is something new. This is an intensified focus and allocation of enforcement resources in the most effective way,

This is about concrete action and what Japan does going forward. That can make a big difference in stimulating the economy, repairing the financial system and encouraging the flow of capital throughout Asia. It will be their steps that will be decisive and not what diplomats agree on here,

In Europe, the stronger growth and reductions in unemployment are now arriving, ... But for better performance to endure, Europe will require substantial structural reforms.

Increases in capacity, along with improvements in productivity performance, have made possible increases in living standards without inappropriate inflationary pressures,

Instead of targeting the rich Zip Codes, we're targeting the poor Zip Codes.

TARGETING POOR ZIP CODES. This is a clear and unambiguous commitment.

It used to be said that when the U.S. sneezed, the world caught a cold. The opposite is equally true today.

The off-center portrait (of Lincoln and Hamilton) has been enlarged; the fine lines printed behind both the portraits are now much more difficult to replicate than the earlier original,

sharp rise in the price of oil is an important concern for consumers and businesses around the world, and has the potential to hit developing countries particularly hard.

The IRS faces a multitude of restrictions -- restrictions that would be unacceptable in the private sector -- that hamper its ability to provide efficient service,

The IRS needs to be more responsive to taxpayers, to use technology more effectively and to be more efficient,

By the end of next year, we expect to establish a regular schedule for offering inflation-indexed securities with maturities of five, 10 and 30 years,

Certainly there was reference to that (Friday's stock market plunge) but the focus of our discussions was on the fundamentals of our economies, what we could do together to develop and sustain economic growth, ... With respect to the stock market, our focus is not to focus on that.

An SAT score means one thing if the student comes from an affluent school, where there are SAT prep courses, and a very different thing if the student comes from a disadvantaged background where there was no SAT classes of any kind.

The inflation outlook does remain contained and unit labor costs (what it costs companies to employ their workers) continue to reflect he absence of inflation pressures,

All this suggests a deeper engagement between India and the US. These cultural connections are sure to build more harmony between the two nations.

The dollar cannot and should not be a tool of trade policy.

The Harvard Crimson did such a good job defending me when I was in trouble, I have full confidence that it can defend the institutional principles of the Ivy League.

The IMF needs to focus its attention to countries' vulnerability

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.

These are clearly issues of great complexity, there is no single structure, no single silver bullet that will be a solution to these problems,

The two-way flow of traffic between India and Harvard is going to be much bigger in the next 5-10 years.

As Secretary Rubin and I have both said many times, a strong dollar is very much in America's national interest,

It should not be a source of low-cost financing for countries with ready access to private capital, or long-term welfare for countries that cannot break the habit of bad policies,

I am worried that we will become a stratified economy, like many in Latin America where the prosperous and the advantaged stay prosperous, and the poor and disadvantaged stay poor,

The longer-term trend is that we've got a remarkably competitive economy, ... In the Game .

All taxes discourage something. Why not discourage bad things like pollution rather than good things like working?

It used to be said that when the U.S. sneezed, the world caught a cold. The opposite is equally true today. Our prosperity is linked inextricably to the maintenance of a strong world economy, an open international trading system, and stable global financial markets.

A good rule of thumb for many things in life holds that things take longer to happen than you think they will, and then happen faster than you thought they could.

When I look out the window at my backyard, I can't think of anything interesting to ask. I mean, it's green, it's growing-but nothing occurs to me that any concentrated effort of thought could possibly enlighten. Whereas in economic, statistical, or mathematical kinds of things, I can think lots of questions.

Spread the truth-the laws of economics are like the laws of engineering. One set of laws works everywhere.

What's the single most important thing to learn from an economics course today? What I tried to leave my students with is the view that the invisible hand is more powerful than the [un]hidden hand. Things will happen in well-organized efforts without direction, controls, plans. That's the consensus among economists. That's the Hayek legacy.

Most investors want to do today what they should have done yesterday.

Deflation and secular stagnation are the risks of our time.

Investment in girls' education may well be the highest-return investment available in the developing world.