Stiglitz:‘US economy in desperate shape’ (Nathan Gardels)

Joseph Stiglitz was awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics in 2001. He spoke from New York with Global Viewpoint editor Nathan Gardels on Tuesday, Sept. 16, about the Wall Street meltdown. 

Nathan Gardels: Barack Obama has said the Wall Street meltdown is the greatest financial crisis since the Great Depression. John McCain says the economy is threatened, but fundamentally strong. Which is it?

{xtypo_quote_right} In this sense, the fall of Wall Street is for market fundamentalism what the fall of the Berlin Wall was for communism — it tells the world that this way of economic organization turns out not to be sustainable. In the end, everyone says, that model doesn’t work. This moment is a marker that the claims of financial market liberalization were bogus. {/xtypo_quote_right} 

Joseph Stiglitz: Obama is much closer to the mark. Yes, America has talented people, great universities and a good hi-tech sector. But the financial markets have played a very important role, accounting for 30 percent of corporate profits in the last few years.

Those who run the financial markets have garnered those profits on the argument they were helping manage risk and efficiently allocating capital, which is why, they said, they “deserved” those high returns.

That’s been shown to be not true. They’ve managed it all badly. Now it has come back to bite them and now the rest of the economy will pay as the wheels of commerce slow because of the credit crunch. No modern economy can function well without a vibrant financial sector.

So, Obama’s diagnosis that our financial sector is in desperate shape is correct. And if it is in desperate shape, that means our economy is in desperate shape.

Even if we weren’t looking at the financial turmoil, but at the level of household, national and federal debt there is a major problem. We are drowning. If we look at inequality, which is the greatest since the Great Depression, there is a major problem. If we look at stagnating wages, there is a major problem.

Most of the economic growth we’ve had in the past five years was based on the housing bubble, which has now burst. And the fruits of that growth have not been shared widely.

In short, the fundamentals are not strong.

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