A biography for Paul Samuelsonhasn’t been written yet.
“Women are men without money.”
“In 1936, money had no important role. Interest rates were one-eighth of one-eighth of one per cent. I did some research, and I found that the interest on one million dollars of ninety-day Treasuries was $37. People didn't even bother to collect it. The Fed wasn't important.”
“I believe, in the stock market - that's one of my fields - that most people are irrational. And to be irrational, you can be irrational in so many different ways that, practically, the result is indeterminate.”
“People have the wrong idea that God will forgive Reagan. They say he didn't know what he was doing. It's true he didn't know a lot of what was going on, but he was directly responsible.”
“When I was a kid, I reckoned things in Hershey bars. Is this worth three Hershey bars to me?”
“Things swept so badly that I had distrust - after 1967, let's say - of American Keynesianism. For better or worse, U.S. Keynesianism was so far ahead of where it started. I am a cafeteria Keynesian.”
“Self-deception ultimately explains Japan's plight. The Japanese have never accepted that change is in their interest - and not merely a response to U.S. criticism.”
“It is indeed true that the stock market can forecast the business cycle.”
“Often, when I became a consultant to a federal agency, that precipitated its demise.”
“'There are no easy pickings.' That would be a more accurate, less dramatic statement than 'There's no such thing as a free lunch.'”
“I did not throw out my education lightly, but what I was being taught was of no use in explaining what I saw around me. It was the Great Depression.”
“In well-functioning markets, price equals opportunity cost. Meaning that the proper way to price out and charge us for things is to charge us what those resources could otherwise have produced. This is a lesson the Soviet Union never learned at all, and the rest is history.”
“We've become a debtor nation. I don't mean just on fixed-loan terms, but we own increasingly less abroad than is owned from abroad here.”
“Actually, in my advanced, high-falutin' frontier economics, I often work with what I define as 'money metric utility,' and I ask people, 'Do you really want that? What are you willing to pay for that?'”
“Good questions outrank easy answers.”
“You're not making a decision if you come to a fork in the road. There is no 'it' to take. It's one or the other.”
“It is dead wrong about necessary surplus of winnings over losings.”
“Investing should be dull. It shouldn't be exciting.”
“There's nothing in Keynesian economics that would allow you to solve stagflation. But there's nothing in neoclassical economics that would allow you to solve stagflation, either.”
“Every good cause is worth some inefficiency.”