$(document).ready( function () { talk_rendercallback({"enabled":"0","islive":"0","eid":5571,"total":"10","discussion":[{"nm":"sakelM","rs":"0","ms":"Hillary Clinton\'s choice of her colleague Brooksley Born to introduce to President Clinton as a possible attorney general was astute. Little did Bill Clinton know when he described her as "bland" and sent her to \'languish\' as Chair of the CFTC that this woman held the key to the door of Understanding that remained locked for Messrs. Greenspan, Ruben, Summers and Geithner.  What is strikingly appalling is that ignorance and arrogance of these failed public servants is now ostentatiously placed right next to the President--offering him economic advice!  Mr. Summers and Mr. Geithner should contact Ms Born and apologize before they resign and go on to take prominent positions in private markets.  Then Stiglitz, Bob Reicher, Sheila Bair and Elizabeth Warren should take their rightful place advising the President--prudently and with their hearts and minds invested in sincerely serving the public\'s purse.  And Brooksley Born could be made honorary adviser.  After all, didn\'t the current President campaign on Hope and Change?","pt":"Feb 16, 2010 22:53"},{"nm":"Enrique Vega","rs":"0","ms":"Dr. Stiglitz does an excellent job of explaining the latest financial crisis and goes a long way to identify the influence of special interests (i.e., Wall Street investment banks) and to expose Greenspan\'s ultimate goal of serving the financial sector, and not the American people.  Ultimately, the risk here is that the cancer has not been removed, as the special interests still rule with an iron fist.  It will take a true American revolution to dethrone the financiers from Washington D.C. and build a government by and for the people.  A first step in this process should be to bank using small, community banks and credit unions, and second, to stop using credit cards and their inefficient fee structures which create poverty, not wealth.\n\nEnrique Vega, \nLos Angeles, CA","pt":"Dec 30, 2009 04:35"},{"nm":"joe smith","rs":"0","ms":"The men who guided us to the economic disaster, who made the huge profits are the same men still in charge.  Small wonder their first concern was saving themselves and their financial money making machines.  They are now lobbying to keep their same un-regulated environment.  Warning that if they do not make 300 times the wage of an engineer they will go elsewhere to cause havoc.  Where would they go and would it matter to anyone but them?  Capitalism works very well for the capitalist; but, what about the the 60% of the population that are middle class, hard working and that perform useful tasks.  They seem to exist for the benefit of the welfare class and the paper shufflers in NY and other big cities.  When will the working class wake up and vote for a social democracy as have the other first world countries.  The Republicans have managed to propagandize the middle class to vote against their best interests.  And the Democrats have been foolish enough to support the welfare class and give credence to the Republicans complaints.  But, all Americans can take blame for living on borrowed money that would take more discipline to pay off than anyone is willing talk about, let alone implement.  History is full of failed empires that developed a populace that tried to live off the labor of others.","pt":"Dec 21, 2009 22:48"},{"nm":"Joe Colangelo","rs":"0","ms":"derivative smerimative, Capitalism is the problem, prone to crisis of overproduction ( one would think that surplus is a good thing), falling rates of profit, encompassing two contradictory interests, those of the worker and those of the owner.  This divide must be eliminated and given humankinds propensity to come up with better easier ways of doing things ie taking care of the basics in order to pursue other interests leads to a system where there is no labour force left to exploit and that is the genetic code of capitalism.  When machines make everything what value are they?  They are worth nothing more than the human labour time taken to produce them so the more we can produce with less manpower the less labour is exploited and the less profit is made-crisis ensues we need to destruct old values to create new ones-usually through war or some other destructive practice.  The problem with the US economy is that they are so anti-socialist they cannot reconcile the contradictions that govern their economy.  Capitalism has failed even when given all of the support in the world, from workers government every thing everywhere and yet these collasal failures are still presented as better than socialism-well I dare say if we socialized all that wealth that went into TARP you would see much better results and a better society.  People can only act within the structures that are already in place-capitalism bi-frucates consciousness, produces a kind of schizophrenia-that is the problem with the liberals-the enlightenment only went so far and what little democratic advances were made when we "freed the serfs"  still needs to be greatly expanded radicalized if you will so that we can over come this lastest dicotomy in society and over come the class divide we must all become worker owner if we are going to survive.  Collectively we can do this.\nand there is no better place to try than in North and South America.","pt":"Dec 14, 2009 11:32"},{"nm":"Michael","rs":"0","ms":"In response to e.loopesko\'s comment.\n\nOne should realize that at the time of the last financial crisis, Prof. Stiglitz was a professor of Economics at Columbia university and was not a government official responsible for treating that problem. Also in relation to Born at the CFTC, this occurred in \'97 after Stiglitz had left government and was working for the IMF.  So it is completely unfair to blame him for not solving these problems. Further it should be noted that Stiglitz has repeatedly written about the problems of the financial markets and predicted the very crisis that we have witnessed before it happened. So his analysis is not post hoc, but in fact was predictive and prior. He repeatedly gave Congressional reports that forewarned about the current dangers. In many ways he is one of the most insightful economists alive.","pt":"Nov  9, 2009 16:22"},{"nm":"Jim Cunningham","rs":"0","ms":"I wish you had been a little harder on our Congress and their part in the Fannie/Freddie meltdowns.  For years Congress was warned by some of its own members about pushing Banks to make loans to people who had no way to pay these loans back and, using extortion tactics used by the Mafia to press Banks into granting such loans. Congress is just as guilty as the Wall Street crowd for causing this mess. Home ownership is not a right.  We should have required large down payments from buyers and, fixed interest rates from lenders. To do otherwise is crazy!  Everyone loses when the game is greed. ","pt":"Nov  5, 2009 23:29"},{"nm":"e.loopesko","rs":"0","ms":"The interview with Dr. Stiglitz explains the root causes of the financial debacle. It is a classic example of "Monday morning quarterbacking". But where was he when we needed him? His clairvoyance seems most apparent and effective "after the fact". When Born was in the frontlines and taking the oncoming fire, where,then was Dr. Stiglitz? Born could and should have had strong backing from respected sources, but where were the pundits then?\n\nAn explanation of what happened is illuminating. A helping informed hand at the time of crisis was necessary, not a smug understanding of what was going on!!","pt":"Oct 30, 2009 20:22"},{"nm":"tendai kamba","rs":"0","ms":"This is a masterpiece, thank you Prof. Stiglitz for explaining the causes of the crisis so well that I lay man like me can understand.  ","pt":"Oct 29, 2009 01:57"},{"nm":"Rich Walker","rs":"0","ms":"Dear Dr. Stiglitz,\n\nYour articulate views of these issues ring true, and you shed important light on some of the causes of the current economic recession.  I can\'t help but wonder whether the root cause of the housing market bubble was the demand for them bundled into Colateralized Debt Obligations (CDOs) for the purposes of trading and betting upon (Credit Default Swaps) by the big bank/gamblers in a sort of virtual, high-roller, members-only casino.\n\nWasn\'t that the table where the "real action". i.e. Las Vegas in terms of dollars being bet, was taking place?  Would that explain, at least in part, the perplexing actions of the rating agencies, who systematically looked the other way as millions of high-risk mortgages whisked by garnering their AAA ratings?  Was this bubble essentially a side-effect of a much bigger agenda?\n\nThank you very much for all of your efforts as we work our way through this morass.\n\nBest regards,\n\nRich Walker\nSebastopol, CA","pt":"Oct 22, 2009 16:18"},{"nm":"Fred Green","rs":"0","ms":"Derivatives WERE the primary, but not the ONLY cause of the 2008 meltdown and they will also be the cause of the 2010 meltdown, from which, I\'m afraid, we will not be able to recover. Fort Knox has no gold. Neither do the London or New York bullion banks. It has all been sold, many times over. \n\nWe MUST, absolutley MUST, control our investment and retail/commercial BANKS with an iron fist. The "market place" only works if LAWS and RULES guide it.","pt":"Oct 21, 2009 22:06"}]}); });