Nobelpristagaren Joseph Stiglitz ar i Bangkok och har blivit intervjuad i The Nation i dag.
What would you have advised the president if you could?
I would have said simply “Play by the rules of capitalism”. The rules say if a bank owes more money than it can pay, go to bankruptcy. The more you have the shareholders pay, the less you have to make the taxpayers pay. If you let the shareholders off the hook then you have more problems than you can answer.
To me it is very clear that the financial market is only part of the problem. So even fixing it still leaves underlying problems. Illness in the financial market runs deeper than much of the financial market cares to admit. To me, throwing money at the financial market will lead not to lending but to the exact kind of behaviour that we had seen.
Is it still a V-shaped situation?
Nobody is talking about V. Most people think it will be some version of a W, which means whenever we recover, it will get worse again. That’s most likely and the debate right now is whether the next down-leg occurs in 2010 or 2011. Very few people are seeing a robust recovery by America.
But the problem was the financial market had done so badly it didn’t [have] the confidence of the rest of America.
What did they do with the bail-out money? They used it to pay bonuses. They used it to pay out dividends. They didn’t use it to lend.
So why didn’t Obama take the appropriate action when he knew in his heart that he was spending his taxpayers’ money to bail out the rich, the Wall Street people?
Just speculating here. I think that at the time, he thought if he could get the financial market fixed, the economy will be fixed and if the economy is fixed, all will be forgiven even if it was unfair. If you fix the financial market, you will fix the economy and you will get away with murder.
To me it is very clear that the financial market is only part of the problem. So even fixing it still leaves underlying problems. Illness in the financial market runs deeper than much of the financial market cares to admit. To me, throwing money at the financial market will lead not to lending but to the exact kind of behaviour that we had seen.
Min bloggkommentar: Jag vill paminna om att The Newsweek for nagon manad hade en hyllningsartikel om professor Stiglitz. Temat var, varfor president Obama inte lyssnar till Stiglitz. Den ende ekonom som forstar vad som hander i dag.
Dagens intervju fran Bangkok finns i bade video och artikelform pa email-adress
http://www.nationmultimedia.com/worldhotnews/30110519/Exclusive-Interview-with-Prof-Joseph-Stiglitz