There are no easy choices. Easy choices are long gone,

The one certainty is that the resolution of the nation's demographic challenge will require hard choices and that the future performance of the economy will depend on those choices.

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.