Small businesses have played an important role in fueling past economic recoveries.

Community development has a long history of innovation and learning from experience.

The movement toward a holistic approach to community development has been long in the making, but the housing crisis has motivated further progress.

For practitioners of community development, as in any field, joining a network of like-minded professionals is important for building skills and becoming aware of opportunities and resources.

Neighborhoods and communities are complex organisms that will be resilient only if they are healthy along a number of interrelated dimensions, much as a human body cannot be healthy without adequate air, water, rest, and food.

Building a rainy-day fund during good times may not be politically popular, but it can pay off during the bad times.

No economy can succeed without a high-quality workforce, particularly in an age of globalization and technical change.

The decline in home equity makes it more difficult for struggling homeowners to refinance and reduces the financial incentive of stressed borrowers to remain in their homes.

Consumers going through foreclosure typically will see their credit scores drop, raising longer-term questions about their ability to rebound financially and perhaps pursue a more sustainable home purchase at some later point.

I don't think there are any students who should not be exposed to a basic financial literacy course.

Smart financial planning - such as budgeting, saving for emergencies, and preparing for retirement - can help households enjoy better lives while weathering financial shocks. Financial education can play a key role in getting to these outcomes.

Monetary policy is a blunt tool which certainly affects the distribution of income and wealth, although whether the net effect is to increase or reduce inequality is not clear.

When the economic well-being of their nation demanded a strong and creative response, my colleagues at the Federal Reserve... mustered the moral courage to do what was necessary.

In the typical economic recovery, a resurgent housing sector helps fuel reemployment and rising incomes.

Many foreclosed homes are neglected or abandoned, as legal proceedings or other factors delay their resale. Deteriorating or vacant properties can, in turn, directly affect the quality of life in a neighborhood, for example, by leading to increases in vandalism or crime.

I am particularly pleased to see that the Bendheim Center for Finance is thriving.

Economic science concerns itself primarily with theoretical and empirical generalizations about the behavior of individuals, institutions, markets, and national economies. Most academic research falls in this category.

Economic engineering is about the design and analysis of frameworks for achieving specific economic objectives.

Economic management involves the operation of economic frameworks in real time - for example, in the private sector, the management of complex financial institutions or, in the public sector, the day-to-day supervision of those institutions.

The one thing people don't appreciate, I think, is that central banking is not a new development. It's been around for a very long time.

To achieve a more balanced international system over time, countries with excessive and unsustainable trade surpluses will need to allow their exchange rates to better reflect market fundamentals.

In a mature economy like India's, which is becoming modern and a financially-oriented economy, an independent central bank, responsible central bank, is really central to success.

Preventing liquidation of an unbalanced market will leave you in tears.

Uncertainty is seen to retard investment independently of considerations of risk or expected return.

Different countries have different kinds of financial structures.

The Mexican debt crisis, Latin American debt crisis, the crises of the 1990s, the Wall Street stock market crash, and other events should have reminded us, and did remind us, that financial instability remains a concern, remains a problem.

In many spheres of human endeavor, from science to business to education to economic policy, good decisions depend on good measurement.

Evolving technologies that allow economists to gather new types of data and to manipulate millions of data points are just one factor among several that are likely to transform the field in coming years.

In the tradition of national income accounting, economic policymakers have typically focused on variables such as income, wealth, and consumption.

Evolutionary psychologists suggest that humans experienced evolutionary benefits from brain developments that included aversion to loss and risk and from instincts for cooperation that helped strengthen communities.

History proves... that a smart central bank can protect the economy and the financial sector from the nastier side effects of a stock market collapse.

There will not be an automatic increase in interest rate when unemployment hits 6.5%.

The Federal Reserve has never suffered any losses in the course of its normal lending to banks and, now, to primary dealers.

To minimize market uncertainty and achieve the maximum effect of its policies, the Federal Reserve is committed to providing the public as much information as possible about the uses of its balance sheet, plans regarding future uses of its balance sheet, and the criteria on which the relevant decisions are based.

The public in many countries is understandably concerned by the commitment of substantial government resources to aid the financial industry when other industries receive little or no assistance. This disparate treatment, unappealing as it is, appears unavoidable.

In the future, financial firms of any type whose failure would pose a systemic risk must accept especially close regulatory scrutiny of their risk-taking.

The financial crisis that began in the summer of 2007 was an extraordinarily complex event with multiple causes.

The Federal Reserve has always recognized the importance of allowing markets to work, and government oversight of financial firms will never be fully effective without the aid of strong market discipline.

If bankers become overly conservative in response to past lending mistakes - or if examiners force such behavior - it will hurt bankers' own long-term interests and the economy in general.

Banks need to continue to lend to creditworthy borrowers to earn a profit and remain strong.

Following an extended boom in housing, the demand for homes began to weaken in mid-2005. By the middle of 2006, sales of both new and existing homes had fallen about 15 percent below their peak levels. Homebuilders responded to the fall in demand by sharply curtailing construction.

Growth in U.S. real imports slowed to about 3 percent in 2006, in part reflecting a drop in real terms in imports of crude oil and petroleum products.

Rents should begin to decelerate as the demand for owner-occupied housing stabilizes and the supply of rental units increases.

To be sure, faster growth in nominal labor compensation does not necessarily portend higher inflation.

Since World War II, inflation - the apparently inexorable rise in the prices of goods and services - has been the bane of central bankers.

Deflation is defined as a general decline in prices, with emphasis on the word 'general.'

Sector-specific price declines, uncomfortable as they may be for producers in that sector, are generally not a problem for the economy as a whole and do not constitute deflation.

The failure of Lehman Brothers demonstrated that liquidity provision by the Federal Reserve would not be sufficient to stop the crisis; substantial fiscal resources were necessary.

To be sure, the provision of liquidity alone can by no means solve the problems of credit risk and credit losses; but it can reduce liquidity premiums, help restore the confidence of investors, and thus promote stability.

Among other objectives, liquidity guidelines must take into account the risks that inadequate liquidity planning by major financial firms pose for the broader financial system, and they must ensure that these firms do not become excessively reliant on liquidity support from the central bank.