"The moment of rethinking capitalism in America has gone," bemoans Joseph E. Stiglitz, winner of the Nobel prize in economics, former World Bank chief economist and now professor of economics at Columbia University, in an exclusive interview with Mediapart.
Stiglitz, 67, says that the height of the current economic crisis represents a lost opportunity to re-order financial institutions, "one of those rare moments, many of us thought a Roosevelt-ian moment". Speaking the same week as the appointment was announced of William Daily as the White House Chief of Staff, Stiglitz says "as soon as the fire was brought down, the political influences of the banks came back."
Stiglitz, a former chairman of Bill Clinton's Council of Economic Advisors, spoke to Mediapart's Sylvain Bourmeau while in Paris this month to promote the publication in France of his book Freefall, Free Markets and the Sinking of the Global Economy. He argues that debt-burdened countries would "almost surely" do better to default on loans than contract more with huge interest rate agreements, and that the consequences of fiscal austerity are "exacerbating structural problems" in society rather than resolving them.
Click on the video to watch (17’ 51”)
For more information about Joseph Stiglitz, his personal website is available here, an extract from Freefall here, and a review of the book here.
