Joseph Stiglitz

Nobel Prize Winner Tells Davos’ Elite, US Should “Get Rid Of Currency”

by

– Nobel Prize winner says US should “get rid of currency”:

In the mid-1800s at a time when the United Kingdom was still the dominant superpower in the world, an English scientist named Francis Galton wrote a series of papers arguing for the selective breeding of human beings.

Galton’s ideas became known as eugenics.

The concept was that genius and talent were hereditary traits passed from generation to generation, and that, to ensure the growth of our species, the best and brightest should be bred like cattle.

Read moreNobel Prize Winner Tells Davos’ Elite, US Should “Get Rid Of Currency”

Nobel Prize-Winning Economist Demands US Taxpayers “Show Humanity & Save Greece”

by

–  Nobel Prize-Winning Economist Demands US Taxpayers “Show Humanity & Save Greece” (ZeroHedge, July 9, 2015):

When the going gets tough, the taxed get going and that is what Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz thinks should happen. In a Time op-ed, Stiglitz warns (likely correctly) that if Greece continues with austerity, it would be depression without end; and so his solution is simple… “The U.S. was generous with Germany as we defeated it. Now, it is time for the U.S. to be generous with our friends in Greece in their time of need, as they have been crushed for the second time in a century by Germany, this time with the support of the troika.” Strawman much?

…

USA: Uncle Sam Is Dead!

by


USA: RIP Uncle Sam

– USA: Uncle Sam is Dead (ToTheTick on Oct 8, 2013):

Isn’t it wonderful how the US believes (whether that be the citizens or the politicians) that the state will never default on its debt repayments? It’s the unfailing belief that your country will pull through and anyone that says otherwise is always either shouted down or told to go elsewhere. It’s all well and good having the belief that you will come out tops. But, the times of the US being at the top of the roost are well and truly over today. We should be playing the funeral march as Obama leaves office for all the debt that has been piled onto the country rather than the Star Spangled tune. The Stars just aren’t that spangled anymore, are they? Unprecedented debt, a budget that isn’t going to get passed, two sides that are playing a stand-off, a country that is held hostage, a debt rating that will be reduced and the Chinese and the Japanese that are now pointing the reprimanding finger.

When the US defaulted on their payments for their mortgages, they got called into the banks and had their houses repossessed back at the start of the financial crises. They were living on credit then and they still are. Obama should get the first plane to Tokyo and then fly on to Beijing. He will be needing to sign a few papers before he hands over the Good Old US of A to the Asians. Uncle Sam is dying a slow and painful death. A death by debt that has shot through the roof of the White House.

Uncle Sam is dead!

Stand-Off

Read moreUSA: Uncle Sam Is Dead!

The Entire Economy Is A Ponzi Scheme!

by

–The Entire Economy Is a Ponzi Scheme (ZeroHedge, April 13, 2013):

Bill Gross, Nouriel Roubini, Laurence Kotlikoff, Steve Keen, Michel Chossudovsky, the Wall Street Journal and many others say that our entire economy is a Ponzi scheme.

Former Reagan budget director David Stockman just agreed:


YouTube Added: 10.04.2013

So did a top Russian con artist and mathematician.

Even the New York Times’ business page asked, “Was [the] whole economy a Ponzi scheme?”

In fact – as we’ve noted for 4 years (and here and here) – the banking system is entirely insolvent. And so are most countries. The whole notion of one country bailing out another country is a farce at this point. The whole system is insolvent.

As we noted last year:

Read moreThe Entire Economy Is A Ponzi Scheme!

Must See Interview With Nassim Taleb (Video)

by

– Taleb On “Skin In The Game” And His Disdain For Public Intellectuals (ZeroHedge, Jan 26, 2013):

Nassim Taleb sits down for a quite extensive interview based around his new book Anti-Fragile. Whether the Black Swan best-seller is philosopher or trader is up to you but the discussion is worth the time as Taleb wonders rigorously from the basic tenets of capitalism – “being more about disincentives that incentives” as failure (he believes) is critical to its success (and is clearly not allowed in our current environment) – to his intellectual influences (and total disdain for the likes of Krugman, Stiglitz, and Friedman – who all espouse grandiose and verbose work with no accountability whatsoever). His fears of large centralized states (such as the US is becoming and Europe is become) being prone to fail along with his libertarianism make for good viewing. However, his fundamental premise that TBTF banks should be nationalized and the critical importance of ‘skin in the game’ for a functioning financial system are all so crucial for the current ‘do no harm’ regime in which we live. Grab a beer (or glass of wine, it is Taleb) and watch…

Via Redmond Weissenberger of the Ludwig von Mises Institute Of Canada,

A must see interview with Nassim Taleb

Nassim Nicholas Taleb is a former trader and hedge fund manager, a best-selling author, and a ground-breaking theorist on risk and resilience.

Taleb drew wide attention after the 2007 publication of The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, which warned that our institutions and risk models aren’t designed to account for rare and catastrophic events. Among other things, the book cautioned that oversized and unaccountable banks using flawed investment models could bring on a financial crisis. He also warned that the government-sanctioned housing finance agencies, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, were sitting on a “barrel of dynamite.”

One year after The Black Swan was published, a global banking crisis was brought on by the very factors he identified.

Read moreMust See Interview With Nassim Taleb (Video)

Mainstream Media Finally Awakens To The Fact That Big Banks Are Criminal Enterprises

by

– Mainstream Media Finally Awakens to the Fact that Big Banks Are Criminal Enterprises (ZeroHedge, Dec 16, 2012)

Gerald Celente: American Dream Debunked (Video)

by


YouTube

See also:

– George Carlin: The Illusion Of Freedom – ‘This Country Finshed!’ (Video):

– George Carlin: The American Dream (Video):

Have The Last 5 Years Been Worse Than The Great Depression?

by

AGAIN: This is the ‘Greatest Depression’.

– Have the Last 5 Years Been Worse than the Great Depression? (ZeroHedge, Sep 21, 2012):

What Do Economic Indicators Say?We’ve repeatedly pointed out that there are many indicators which show that the last 5 years have been worse than the Great Depression of the 1930s, including:

Mark McHugh reports:

Velocity of money is the  frequency with which a unit of money is spent on new goods and services.   It is a far better indicator of economic activity than GDP, consumer prices, the stock market, or sales of men’s underwear (which Greenspan was fond of ogling).  In a healthy economy, the same dollar is collected as payment and subsequently spent many times over.  In a depression, the velocity of money goes catatonic.  Velocity of money is calculated by simply dividing GDP by a given money supply.  This VoM chart using monetary base  should end any discussion of what ”this” is and whether or not anybody should be using the word “recovery” with a straight face:

In just four short years, our “enlightened” policy-makers have slowed money velocity to depths never seen in the Great Depression.

(As we’ve previously explained, the Fed has intentionally squashed money multipliers and money velocity as a way to battle inflation. And see this)

Indeed, the number of Americans relying on government assistance to obtain basic food may be higher now that during the Great Depression.  The only reason we don’t see the “soup lines” like we did in the 30s only because of the massive food stamp program.

Read moreHave The Last 5 Years Been Worse Than The Great Depression?

The Bill Clinton Myth

by

– The Bill Clinton Myth (ZeroHedge, Sep 9, 2012):

Earlier this week, former U.S. president Bill Clinton gave the keynote address to the Democractic National Convention in an effort to lend some of his popularity to Barack Obama.  With the unemployment rate still stubbornly high at 8.1%, Obama has lost many of the enthused voters who put him into the Oval Office in 2008.  Clinton was tapped to deliver the speech not only because of his image of a wonkish pragmatist but because of his presiding over the booming economy of the late 1990s.  Like a prized mule, Clinton was dragged out to give Democrats someone to point to and say that his policies were the hallmark of smart governance.

Read moreThe Bill Clinton Myth

Former Head of Russia’s Central Bank: US Is To Some Extent Indebted To The Entire World And That In A Unipolar System Which Keeps Pursuing Globalization, This Spells An Inevitable Collapse

by

– US shirked its responsibility to the global economy – top Russian economist (RT, August 04, 2011):

The former head of Russia’s Central Bank has said that the US is to some extent Indebted to the entire world and that in a unipolar system which keeps pursuing globalization, this spells an inevitable collapse.

­RT: Mr. Gerashchenko, hello and thank you very much for being here. You became head of Centrobank [Russia’s Central Bank] when Russia began pursuing its ‘shock therapy’ policy, following advice from American experts. How would you advise your American colleagues now, with the situation they are facing?

Viktor Gerashchenko: Live within your means, that’s all. That’s just what they told us back then, with no idea at all about our economic and social situation at the time. That was in 1992, when we began – well, parts of the government began – to listen to their advice after Russia joined the IMF that year. Later, they wrote – and the famous Stieglitz, a Nobel laureate and former economic advisor to Clinton, was among them – that they were doing everything wrong. What they were telling us was all wrong.

Read moreFormer Head of Russia’s Central Bank: US Is To Some Extent Indebted To The Entire World And That In A Unipolar System Which Keeps Pursuing Globalization, This Spells An Inevitable Collapse

Joseph Stiglitz: The Euro May Not Survive

by

It is correct that the euro, the dollar and the pound will not survive and that a new world currency will be proposed as the only solution to all problems.

Deficit spending (Keynesianism) is an invention of elite criminals that want to loot and bankrupt the people:

“In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation. … This is the shabby secret of the welfare statists’ tirades against gold. Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the confiscation of wealth. Gold stands in the way of this insidious process. It stands as a protector of property rights. If one grasps this, one has no difficulty in understanding the statists’ antagonism toward the gold standard.”
– Alan Greenspan

“When a country embarks on deficit financing and inflationism you wipe out the middle class and wealth is transferred from the middle class and the poor to the rich.”
– Ron Paul

“Deficits mean future tax increases, pure and simple. Deficit spending should be viewed as a tax on future generations, and politicians who create deficits should be exposed as tax hikers.”
– Ron Paul

Joseph Stiglitz, one of the world’s leading economists, has warned that the future of the euro is “looking bleak” and the fragile European economic recovery could be irreparably damaged by a “wave of austerity” sweeping the continent.


Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel prize winner, warned that speculators are putting pressure on Spain

The former chief economist of the World Bank and a Nobel prize winner also predicted that short-term speculators in the market could soon start putting pressure on Spain, which is struggling with a large deficit and high unemployment. Last week, Moody’s cut the country’s credit rating from AAA to Aa1.

The former adviser to President Bill Clinton also says that the banking sector has gone back to “business as usual” too quickly and that there are still risks of another financial crisis despite some improvements in regulation.

Mr Stiglitz, now a professor at Columbia Business School, makes the arguments in an updated edition of his book, Freefall, on the credit crunch. In the new material, exclusively extracted in today’s Sunday Telegraph, he reveals fears that governments around the world will attempt to cut their deficits too quickly and risk a double dip recession.

Tomorrow, George Osborne will outline the Government’s latest plans for multi-billion pound public sector cuts to tackle the historically-high UK deficit. He has faced criticism that the Coalition is in danger of cutting too hard and too fast but the Chancellor has said that without a credible programme for getting the UK economy into balance, interest rates will rise and growth will be choked off.

“The worry is that there is a wave of austerity building throughout Europe and even hitting America’s shores,” Mr Stiglitz said. “As so many countries cut back on spending prematurely, global aggregate demand will be lowered and growth will slow – even perhaps leading to a double-dip recession.

“America may have caused the global recession but Europe is now responding in kind.”

Mr Stiglitz warned that Spain, similarly to Greece, was now in the speculators’ sights.

Read moreJoseph Stiglitz: The Euro May Not Survive

Nobel Prize-Winning Economist Joseph Stiglitz: Federal Reserve System is Corrupt and Undermines Democracy

by

joseph-stiglitz
Joseph Stiglitz

Joseph Stiglitz – former head economist at the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and a nobel-prize winner – said yesterday that the very structure of the Federal Reserve system is so fraught with conflicts that it is “corrupt” and undermines democracy.

Stiglitz said:

If we [i.e. the IMF] had seen a governance structure that corresponds to our Federal Reserve system, we would have been yelling and screaming and saying that country does not deserve any assistance, this is a corrupt governing structure.

Stiglitz pointed out that – if another country had presented a plan to reform its financial system, and included a regulatory regime that copied the makeup of the Federal Reserve system – “it would have been a big signal that something is wrong.”

Stiglitz stressed that the Fed banks have clear conflicts of interest, since the banks are largely governed by a board of directors that includes officers of the very banks they’re supposed to be overseeing:

So, these are the guys who appointed the guy who bailed them out … Is that a conflict of interest?

They would say, ‘no conflict of interest, we were just doing our job. But you have to look at the conflicts of interest”…

The reason you talk about governance is because in a democracy you want people to have confidence … This is a structure that will undermine confidence in a democracy.

Indeed, by all objective measures, the Fed has performed horribly (and see this).

Read moreNobel Prize-Winning Economist Joseph Stiglitz: Federal Reserve System is Corrupt and Undermines Democracy

Joseph Stiglitz: Banking Problems Are Now Bigger Than Before The Crisis

by

Related article: – Stock Market: Insiders sell like there’s no tomorrow

… so the worst is yet to come. Finally the people in the US are waking up:
– Up To Two Million March to US Capitol Protesting Obama’s Spending

… looks like nobody is waking up in the UK:
– Britain ‘may be forced to bail out tax havens’:
Senior insiders say early drafts of Foot’s report suggest that the government may need to make provisions for the financial failure of British tax havens. Experts suggest the failure of a major tax haven could potentially cost the UK tens, if not hundreds, of millions of pounds.

Britain is bailing out everybody with taxpayer money and there are no signs of real protest.

Stiglitz Says Banking Problems Are Now Bigger Than Pre-Lehman

joseph-stiglitz-nobel-prize-winning-economist
Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel Prize-winning economist, speaks at a panel discussion in Beijing, on May 13, 2009. Photographer: Nelson Ching/Bloomberg

Sept. 13 (Bloomberg) — Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel Prize-winning economist, said the U.S. has failed to fix the underlying problems of its banking system after the credit crunch and the collapse of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc.

“In the U.S. and many other countries, the too-big-to-fail banks have become even bigger,” Stiglitz said in an interview today in Paris. “The problems are worse than they were in 2007 before the crisis.”

Stiglitz’s views echo those of former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, who has advised President Barack Obama’s administration to curtail the size of banks, and Bank of Israel Governor Stanley Fischer, who suggested last month that governments may want to discourage financial institutions from growing “excessively.”

Read moreJoseph Stiglitz: Banking Problems Are Now Bigger Than Before The Crisis

America’s liberals lay into Obama

by

The liberal backlash against President Barack Obama has begun with many prominent left-leaning economists in the US attacking the administration’s plans to bail out the banks.

Paul Krugman describes the toxic asset purchase plan as “cash for trash”. Jeffrey Sachs calls it “a thinly veiled attempt to transfer hundreds of billions of US taxpayer funds to the commercial banks”. Robert Reich depicts Tim Geithner, Treasury secretary, as a prisoner of Wall Street while Joe Stiglitz says the plan “amounts to robbery of the American people”.

On the blogosphere and beyond, Democratic economists accuse Mr Obama – along with Mr Geithner, and Lawrence Summers, the president’s senior economic adviser – of taking dictation from the same financiers who have brought the economy to the brink of depression.

Read moreAmerica’s liberals lay into Obama

Geithner Plan Will Rob US Taxpayers: Stiglitz

by

HONG KONG (Reuters) – The U.S. government plan to rid banks of toxic assets will rob American taxpayers by exposing them to too much risk and is unlikely to work as long as the economy remains weak, Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz said on Tuesday.

“The Geithner plan is very badly flawed,” Stiglitz told Reuters in an interview during a Credit Suisse Asian Investment Conference in Hong Kong.

U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner’s plan to wipe up to US$1 trillion in bad debt off banks’ balance sheets, unveiled on Monday, offered “perverse incentives”, Stiglitz said.

The U.S. government is basically using the taxpayer to guarantee against downside risk on the value of these assets, while giving the upside, or potential profits, to private investors, he said.
“Quite frankly, this amounts to robbery of the American people. I don’t think it’s going to work because I think there’ll be a lot of anger about putting the losses so much on the shoulder of the American taxpayer.”

Read moreGeithner Plan Will Rob US Taxpayers: Stiglitz

Volcker, Warren and Stiglitz Slam Government Approach to Crisis

by

Former fed chair Paul Volcker, TARP bailout overseer Elizabeth Warren and Nobel economist Joseph Stiglitz all slammed the government’s approach to the economic crisis today:

  • Volcker accuses Obama’s National Economic Council Director – and consummate financial insider – Lawrence Summers for slowing down the effort to organize a panel of outside advisers on the crisis
  • Warren has discovered that Paulson overpaid by $78 billion dollars for toxic assets purchased from financial institutions
  • And Stiglitz writes:

    “Perhaps the entire strategy is flawed? Perhaps what is needed is a fundamental rethinking. The Paulson-Bernanke-Geithner strategy was … based on a failure to grasp some of the fundamental changes in our financial sector since the Great Depression, and even in the last two decades.“

Will Bernanke, Summers and the other people who got us into this mess keep on steering the ship over the waterfall? Or will the powers-that-be start to listen to those telling where we are, and start steering away before it is too late?

Thursday, February 5, 2009

Source: George Washington’s Blog

Stiglitz Criticizes Bad Bank Plan as Swapping ‘Cash for Trash’

by

Jan. 31 (Bloomberg) — Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz said any decision by President Barack Obama to establish a so-called bad bank to rid financial companies of toxic assets risks swelling the national debt.

Obama’s administration is moving closer to buying the illiquid assets currently clogging bank’s balance sheets and preventing them from boosting lending, people familiar with the matter said this week.

That amounts to swapping taxpayers’ “cash for trash,” Stiglitz said in a panel discussion at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland today. “You shouldn’t chase good money after bad. We’re talking about a national debt that’s very hard to manage.”

Stiglitz, a professor at Columbia University in New York and a former adviser to President Bill Clinton, says the plan would leave taxpayers picking up the bill for years of excess lending by banks. It would also deprive the government of money that would have been better spent shoring up Social Security, he said.

Read moreStiglitz Criticizes Bad Bank Plan as Swapping ‘Cash for Trash’

Iraq war may cost US USD 7 trillion

by

Noble Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz estimates that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan may cost the US up to USD 7 trillion.When US troops invaded Iraq in March 2003, the Bush administration predicted that the war would be self-financing and that rebuilding the nation would cost less than USD 2b, but Stiglitz estimates that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are costing America more than USD 3 trillion.

That estimate from the Noble Prize-winning Sttiglitz also serves as the title of his new book, “The Three Trillion Dollar War”, which hits store shelves Friday.

The book, co-authored with Harvard University professor Linda Bilmes, builds on previous research that was published in January 2006. The two argued then and now that the cost to America of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is wildly underestimated.

stiglitz.JPG

Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes
Read moreIraq war may cost US USD 7 trillion