Joseph Stiglitz: Trump Has 'Fascist' Tendencies

The economist and author of Globalisation and its Discontents talks to the Guardian's Larry Elliott about why he considers Donald Trump unfit to be US president. He says stagnant incomes, the opioid crisis and falling life expectancies all pointed towards a political problem in the US but no one imagined it leading to a Trump presidency

The Nation Is in Deep Debt and Stiglitz Calls for Profligacy! Osborne's First Budget? It's Wrong, Wrong, Wrong!
THE INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY: Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel prizewinner who predicted the global crisis, delivers his verdict on the Chancellor's first Budget and tells Paul Vallely it will take the UK deeper into recession and hit millions – the poorest – badly

George Osborne will probably not be very bothered that there is a man who thinks he got last week's emergency Budget almost entirely wrong. But he should be. Because that man is a former chief economist at the World Bank who won the Nobel Prize for Economics for his work on why markets do not produce the outcomes which, in theory, they ought to.

Professor Joseph Stiglitz, who has been described as the biggest brain in economics, is distinctly unimpressed by George Osborne's strategy. This, he predicts, will make Britain's recovery from recession longer, slower and harder than it needs to be. The rise in VAT could even tip us into a double-dip recession.

Stiglitz, who was once Bill Clinton's senior economic adviser, is now professor of economics and finance at Columbia Business School. He was in the UK this week at the University of Manchester, where he chairs the Brooks World Poverty Institute, but he lifted his head from the detail of international development to scrutinise the economic strategy of the Conservative Chancellor whose Liberal Democrat partners recently reversed their judgement that massive public spending cuts now would endanger the economy and joined in the Tory slash-and-burn strategy. They were deeply wrong to do so, he believes. Continue reading and comment >>> | Sunday, June 27, 2010

Joseph Stiglitz : "L'austérité mène au désastre"
LE MONDE: Joseph Stiglitz, 67 ans, Prix Nobel d'économie en 2001, ex-conseiller économique du président Bill Clinton (1995-1997) et ex-chef économiste de la Banque mondiale (1997-2000), est connu pour ses positions critiques sur les grandes institutions financières internationales, la pensée unique sur la mondialisation et le monétarisme. Il livre au Monde son analyse de la crise de l'euro.

Vous avez récemment dit que l'euro n'avait pas d'avenir sans réforme majeure. Qu'entendez-vous par là ?

L'Europe va dans la mauvaise direction. En adoptant la monnaie unique, les pays membres de la zone euro ont renoncé à deux instruments de politique économique : le taux de change et les taux d'intérêt. Il fallait donc trouver autre chose qui leur permette de s'adapter à la conjoncture si nécessaire. D'autant que Bruxelles n'a pas été assez loin en matière de régulation des marchés, jugeant que ces derniers étaient omnipotents. Mais l'Union européenne (UE) n'a rien prévu dans ce sens.

Et aujourd'hui, elle veut un plan coordonné d'austérité. Si elle continue dans cette voie-là, elle court au désastre. Nous savons, depuis la Grande Dépression des années 1930, que ce n'est pas ce qu'il faut faire. >>> Propos recueillis par Virginie Malingre, Londres Correspondante | Samedi 22 Mai 2010

Joseph Stiglitz: Why We Have to Change Capitalism
THE TELEGRAPH: In an exclusive extract from his new book, Freefall, the former World Bank chief economist, reveals why banks should be split up and why the West must cut consumption.

Joseph Stiglitz Photo: The Telegraph
In the Great Recession that began in 2008, millions of people in America and all over the world lost their homes and jobs. Many more suffered the anxiety and fear of doing so, and almost anyone who put away money for retirement or a child's education saw those investments dwindle to a fraction of their value.

A crisis that began in America soon turned global, as tens of millions lost their jobs worldwide – 20m in China alone – and tens of millions fell into poverty.

This is not the way things were supposed to be. Modern economics, with its faith in free markets and globalisation, had promised prosperity for all. The much-touted New Economy – the amazing innovations that marked the latter half of the 20th century, including deregulation and financial engineering – was supposed to enable better risk management, bringing with it the end of the business cycle. If the combination of the New Economy and modern economics had not eliminated economic fluctuations, at least it was taming them. Or so we were told.

The Great Recession – clearly the worst downturn since the Great Depression 75 years earlier – has shattered these illusions. It is forcing us to rethink long-cherished views.

For a quarter century, certain free-market doctrines have prevailed: free and unfettered markets are efficient; if they make mistakes, they quickly correct them. The best government is a small government, and regulation only impedes innovation. Central banks should be independent and only focus on keeping inflation low.

Today, even the high priest of that ideology, Alan Greenspan, the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board during the period in which these views prevailed, has admitted that there was a flaw in this reasoning – but his confession came too late for the many who have suffered as a consequence.

In time, every crisis ends. But no crisis, especially one of this severity, passes without leaving a legacy. The legacy of 2008 will include new perspectives on the long-standing conflict over the kind of economic system most likely to deliver the greatest benefit.

I believe that markets lie at the heart of every successful economy but that markets do not work well on their own. In this sense, I'm in the tradition of the celebrated British economist John Maynard Keynes, whose influence towers over the study of modern economics.

Government needs to play a role, and not just in rescuing the economy when markets fail and in regulating markets to prevent the kinds of failures we have just experienced. Economies need a balance between the role of markets and the role of government – with important contributions by non-market and non-governmental institutions. In the last 25 years, America lost that balance, and it pushed its unbalanced perspective on countries around the world.

The current crisis has uncovered fundamental flaws in the capitalist system, or at least the peculiar version of capitalism that emerged in the latter part of the 20th century in the US (sometimes called American-style capitalism). It is not just a matter of flawed individuals or specific mistakes, nor is it a matter of fixing a few minor problems or tweaking a few policies.

It has been hard to see these flaws because we Americans wanted so much to believe in our economic system. "Our team" had done so much better than our arch enemy, the Soviet bloc. >>> | Saturday, January 23, 2010

Joseph Stiglitz*: America Counts Cost of Wars It Can’t Win
… most analysts agree that at least part of the rationale behind Russia's invasion of Georgia, reigniting fears of a new Cold War, was its confidence that, with America's armed forces preoccupied with two failing wars (and badly depleted because of a policy of not replacing military resources as fast as they are used up), there was little America could do in response. Russia's calculations proved correct. - Joseph Stiglitz

THE AGE / /Business Day: The war in Iraq has been an expensive lesson for the US Government.

THE Iraq war has been replaced by the declining economy as the most important issue in America's presidential election campaign, in part because Americans have come to believe that the tide has turned in Iraq: the troop "surge" has supposedly cowed the insurgents, bringing a decline in violence. The implications are clear: a show of power wins the day.

It is precisely this kind of macho reasoning that led America to war in Iraq in the first place. The war was meant to demonstrate the strategic power of military might. Instead, the war showed its limitations. Moreover, the war undermined America's real source of power — its moral authority. America Counts Cost of Wars It Can’t Win >>> By Joseph Stiglitz | September 10, 2008

* Joseph Stiglitz, professor of economics at Columbia University, and recipient of the 2001 Nobel Prize in Economics, is co-author, with Linda Bilmes, of The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Costs of the Iraq Conflict.

The Dawning of a New Dark Age – Dust Jacket Hardcover, direct from the publishers (US) >>>
The Dawning of a New Dark Age – Paperback, direct from the publishers (US) >>>