Jeffrey Sachs's Quotes

There's a lot of strength in the U.S., but there's a lot of froth also. The froth will blow off. We're going to have to face up to some realities that we're not fully facing up to right now.

Unfortunately, the real focus in this country has not been on the rest of the world. It's been on our own issues and our own problems. Fair enough. But it means that our simple hopes that everything will just work out abroad aren't really coming to pass.

We were proposing, in a sense, that the rest of the world be made safe for American ideas, as they adopted intellectual property rights that gave patent protection to our very innovative economy.

We're going to have to forgive a great deal of the Soviet era debt. There's no question about that. Let's face up to that. We're going to have to put in money if Russia is really going to consolidate a democracy.

We've taken the view that if the rest of the world would democratize and create market economies, that would spread the benefits of prosperity around the world, and that it would enhance our own prosperity, and our own stability and security, as well.

We, being the Western world, wouldn't let Russia off the hook on debt. So there were demands on debt servicing in the early days until they ran out of reserves. There was no real aid program, just a fictional aid program.

We had a booming stock market in 1929 and then went into the world's greatest depression. We have a booming stock market in 1999. Will the bubble somehow burst, and then we enter depression? Well, some things are not different.

Roosevelt talked not only about Freedom from Fear, but also Freedom from Want.

Globalization was a deep trend pushed by technology and right ideas, as much as anything else.

The debts are unaffordable. If they won't cancel the debts I would suggest obstruction; you do it yourselves.

Devaluations are never easy.

I think the IMF helped to detonate the Indonesian crisis.

It's not so unusual to run out of someone else's currency.

Let's start fresh with Russia on some real help and some real reform.

Russia has gone through eight years of continuing economic pain.

The essence of Africa's crisis is fundamentally its extreme poverty.

The longer you wait, the less fun. If you wait until the bitter end, the whole economy can be destroyed.

The runs started in Thailand after the IMF intervened in such a dramatic way. Then the IMF came to Indonesia.

White House and State Department foreign-policy experts are overwhelmingly directed towards military and diplomatic issues, not development issues.

Despite a decade of criticism and budget cuts, the specialised UN agencies have far more expertise and hands-on experience than any other organisations in the world.

If we did go into a recession, something that's always possible for the U.S. or Europe, we could lower interest rates and expand the money supply without worrying about the price of gold.

If you have a lot of short-term debt, it means that all of that money can be demanded in a very short period of time. Technically, short-term debt means money that's coming due within a year. Typically, it means money that's coming due within 30 to 90 days.

In Asia, a lot of successful economies that had been living on their own saving, decided to open up their financial markets to international capital in the early 1990s. So here were countries doing quite well, but they decided they'd borrow a bit more and do even better.