John B. Taylor

The government is involved. It causes all sorts of issues, political. The government is not good at managing private firms, in my view.

there is little empirical evidence that government spending is a way to end a recession or accelerate a recovery.

I think the holes in some of these balance sheets that we have now, especially if we mark the true market valuations, is so large that to make a good bank/bad bank solution to any of these large banks work now, public moneys would be…

That is why I say it is so important to think about the things like Social Security, to think about the fact that we have a large deficit coming in now.

I really think the independence of the Federal Reserve has been very important and why we have basically had good policy for 20 years.

I thought it was actually very helpful in clarifying that nationalization was not as commonly defined--at least not the way he would go about this.

I sometimes think that government should have more faith in these self-correcting mechanisms.

I note we had 300,000 foreclosure filings in December. The crisis is still going at full bore.

With respect to the tax rates, I see no reason to do anything except to commit to keeping those rates from rising.