By the time I became chairman and there was more of a feeling of urgency, there was a willingness to accept more forceful measures to try to deal with the inflation.
Double-digit inflation is a terrible thing - and it got up to 14 or 15 percent on a monthly basis for a while, shortly after I became chairman of the Fed.
I am suspicious of the idea of a new paradigm, to use that word, an entirely new structure of the economy.
Inflation is thought of as a cruel, and maybe the cruelest, tax because it hits in a many-sectored way, in an unplanned way, and it hits the people on a fixed income hardest.
It was the biggest inflation and the most sustained inflation that the United States had ever had.
Less emphasis on inventories, I think, may tend to dampen business cycles, because business cycles are typically in the grasp of inventory cycles and heavy industry cycles.
Once a lender begins anticipating it, that equation changes, because he's going to say, "I expect inflation, so I'm going to charge you more than I would otherwise charge you."
The speed of communication, the speed of information transfer, the cheapness of communication, the ease of moving things around the world are a difference in kind as well as degree.
Well, by the standards of a lot of countries, by Latin American standards, it wasn't so bad.
Well, I started out in the Federal Reserve as a young economist and spent about five years in the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
What's the subject of life - to get rich? All of those fellows out there getting rich could be dancing around the real subject of life.
When people begin anticipating inflation, it doesn't do you any good anymore, because any benefit of inflation comes from the fact that you do better than you thought you were going to do.
You could not buy a house in those days without just assuming that the house was not only a place to live, but it was a good investment, because it was going to keep up with inflation or get ahead of inflation, and it was just - that was America.
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