05 December 2008

Where is Stiglitz?

At Newsweek, Michael Hirsh asks this important question.

Joseph Stiglitz has a Nobel prize in economics, and he called the financial crisis, and made the correct policy recommendations about how to prevent it, for well over a decade.

Unfortunately, Obama is turning marginally enlightened Chicago School types like Austan Goolsbee, and people with a lineage that traces its path from Wall Street kleptocrats *cough*Robert Rubin*cough*, like Larry Summers, and neither of these groups are particularly interested in someone who has been consistently proved right, because he has also proveds them wrong.

This is the best endorsement of Stiglitz being brought in I can think of:
Like Keynes himself, who fought successfully to block "hot money" at the postwar Bretton Woods conference in 1944, Stiglitz understood the problem of international capital flows like few others of his era. As his longtime collaborator Bruce Greenwald—another Columbia professor who, by the way, is a conservative Republican—puts it: "You need radical global reform" to correct chronic imbalances in capital flows, all of which Stiglitz has laid out in his book, "Making Globalization Work."
This is precisely our problem, and this man has gotten a Nobel plotting the solutions.

Quite my solution, in the broadest terms, is to recognize that Wall Street (and the Street in London, and the rest of the financial markets) have become gangrenous, and need to be amputated, but Stiglitz, has the specifics as to what is rotten.

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