Lacy Hunt Quotes

"The country is entering a period of debt deflation, where households and businesses are forced to move funds from spending to debt repayment. This forces down economic growth and reduces inflationary pressures and long-term interest rates."

"The risk to the economy is that we lose the consumer -- and I think we are losing the consumer."

"This economy is not producing jobs in a normal way. We have serious global competitive pressures working on the economy. There continues to be a very rapid increase in productivity, which is undermining demand for labor."

"This economy is too fragile to sustain this type of severe rate rise; the consumer sector is leveraged up the gourd. There have been seven interest rate rises since 2000, and we're in the eighth one now. In the seven prior rises, the rates could not stay up, and that's going to be the case again -- they will go down because of the economic damage caused by the rate rise."

"The Fed has made a statement here that they are not going to allow higher energy costs to translate into inflation."

"The Fed was given control of margin lending in response to the excess speculation in the 1920s,"

"The ratio of corporate debt to gross domestic product (GDP) is at an all-time high, ... And we don't know exactly what corporate debt is because so much has been parked off the balance sheet and hidden. But, even without knowing what the off-balance-sheet debt is, corporations have too much."

"When you have a large debt buildup and a lot of excess capacity, that's not corrected very quickly."

"In Japan, for example, the debt deflation started in 1990 and price deflation started in 1992 or 1993. That's what we're in for right now."

"When you have a large debt buildup and a lot of excess capacity, that's not corrected very quickly,"

"When [consumers] shift their income stream from purchases to saving, it slows GDP, and that's a long-term process, ... I think interest rates are going to remain very low for a couple of years."

"When [consumers] shift their income stream from purchases to saving, it slows GDP, and that's a long-term process. I think interest rates are going to remain very low for a couple of years."

"Powerful restraining forces are impacting the consumer, and this will result in slower growth in the latter part of this year and into 2005,"

"In the past two years, we've seen the budget go from surplus to deficit, adding about $400 billion of stimulus to the economy, but we've still lost 2.5 million private-sector jobs."

"I don't think any benefit of the dividend tax elimination is worth the increase in the deficit."