Daily Inspiration Quote by Ben Bernanke

Price stability is Bernanke’s way of telling you the Fed’s real product isn’t money, it’s credibility. The line reads like a civics-text platitude, but it’s actually a hierarchy disguised as balance: yes, the central bank has multiple mandates, but inflation control is framed as the master switch that makes the others possible. That rhetorical move matters because it turns a potentially contested political choice into a technocratic prerequisite. If maximum employment and “moderate long-term interest rates” depend on stable prices, then fights about jobs or borrowing costs quietly get rerouted into a narrower debate about inflation expectations.

The subtext is a post-1970s lesson delivered with lawyerly calm. After the era when spiraling prices were seen to corrode growth and social trust, central bankers learned to treat inflation not just as an economic variable but as a moral hazard: once people expect prices to rise, wage bargaining hardens, firms preemptively mark up, and policy loses traction. Bernanke, an expert on the Great Depression, also carries the shadow belief that instability can be self-fulfilling and catastrophic; “stability” becomes a defensive strategy against panic, not merely a comfort.

Context sharpens the intent. Coming out of the Greenspan years and into the 2000s-and especially the crisis decade the Fed needed to justify extraordinary actions while insisting it hadn’t abandoned its mission. This sentence is a bridge: it reassures inflation hawks that employment-forward policy is still, fundamentally, an inflation policy by another name.