It is much too soon to conclude that these concerns are behind us, ... We cannot yet be sure that the slower expansion of domestic final demand, at a pace more in line with potential supply, will persist.

... the flexibility of our market-driven economy has allowed us, thus far, to weather reasonably well the steep rise in spot and futures prices for crude oil and natural gas that we have experienced over the past two years,

Forecasting our futures is built into our psyches because we will soon have to manage that future. We have no choice. No matter how often we fail, we can never stop trying.

We really can't forecast all that well, and yet we pretend that we can, but we really can't.

People don't realize that we cannot forecast the future. What we can do is have probabilities of what causes what, but that's as far as we go. And I've had a very successful career as a forecaster, starting in 1948 forward. The number of mistakes I have made are just awesome. There is no number large enough to account for that.

Derivative instruments were bystanders, ... They may well have intensified the losses in underlying markets, but they were scarcely the major players.