a curious Yankee in Europe's court

Continuing in my effort to learn to speak Wall Street, I came across a video of a talk in late January by Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz. The economist was a guest speaker at the Commonwealth Club of California. The occasion was the recent publication of his new book — “Freefall: America, Free Markets, and the Sinking of the World Economy” (Jan 2010).

Stiglitz was one of the few who early predicted the fall of Wall Street. In this recent talk, he mentions that he had hoped the silver lining of the 2008 financial crisis would be a push for new finance regulations, but that this hasn’t happened.

Excerpt:

In 1996 we reformed welfare for the poor, and when we reformed welfare for the poor we said, if you’re going to get welfare payments from the government you have to either look for a job or go into a training program to increase your skills. But when we put the banks on welfare — and we ought to be clear — it was a bigger welfare program than the total amount we will spend on the poor over a century… the welfare payment for the banks is larger than what we will be spending on poor people literally over a century.

So this is a huge amount. But when we did that, we didn’t put any conditions, and we should have. You know, the banks said, well, trust us. The point is, look at how they behaved before that. We had every reason not to trust them…

In a seven-minute interview on Thursday for The Washington Note, Nobel Economics winner Joseph Stiglitz prescribes good sense remedies for the USA economy:

And in a two-minute talk to the public this week, Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig explains why  Congress isn’t listening:

Learn more about the work of Change Congress here.

In his short whodunit article, “Capitalist Fools” in this week’s Vanity Fair, Nobel-laureate economist Joseph E. Stiglitz identifies exactly who led the world into its current state of economic havoc (Jan 2009).

Intro blurb:

Behind the debate over remaking U.S. financial policy will be a debate over who’s to blame. It’s crucial to get the history right, writes a Nobel-laureate economist, identifying five key mistakes—under Reagan, Clinton, and Bush II—and one national delusion