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Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz: Greece Not the Problem, Germany Is



By admin on February 2, 2015 Greece, News

Nobel Prize-winning economist and Columbia University professor Joseph Stiglitz .. https://twitter.com/josephestiglitz .. told CNBC on Monday that the policies Europe has pushed on Greece have not worked and was harshly critical, calling them a mistake. He called the Euro a failed experiment and suggested that Germany benefitted much more than anyone.

“While it was an experiment to bring them together, nothing has divided Europe as much as the euro,” Stiglitz said in a “Squawk Box” interview.

Greece is not the only economy struggling under the euro, and that’s why a new approach is needed, Stiglitz said. “The policies that Europe has foisted on Greece just have not worked and that’s true of Spain and other countries.”

The professor is one of 18 prominent economists who co-authored a letter saying that Europe would benefit from giving Greece a fresh start through debt reduction and a further conditional extension in the grace period. But in the letter in the Financial Times last week, they stressed that Greece would also have to carry out reforms.

“Greece made a few mistakes … but Europe made even bigger mistakes,” Stiglitz told CNBC. “The medicine they gave was poisonous. It led the debt to grow up and the economy to go down.”

“If Greece leaves, I think Greece will actually do better. … There will be a period of adjustment. But Greece will start to grow,” he said. “If that happens, you going to see Spain and Portugal, they’ve been giving us this toxic medicine and there’s an alternative course.”

Insisting that it’s best for Europe and the world to keep the euro intact, he argued that keeping the single currency together requires more integration. “There’s a whole set of an unfinished economic agenda which most economists agree on, except Germany doesn’t.”

He said the real problem is Germany, which has benefited greatly under the euro. “Most economists are saying the best solution for Europe, if it’s going to break up, is for Germany to leave. The mark would raise, the German economy would be dampened.”

Under that scenario, Germany would find out just how much it needs the euro to stay together, he added, and possibly be more willing to help out the countries that are struggling. “The hope was, by having a shared currency, they would grow together.” But he said that should work both ways.

VIDEO

http://www.pappaspost.com/nobel-laureate-joseph-stiglitz-greece-not-problem-germany/

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Stiglitz - Nov 2012 - Structural Problems of Euro

fresia58 - Published on Nov 27, 2012

the ability of countries to be able to use interest rates and exchange rates to manage their economies is key .. those were taken away, and Europe didn't put anything in their place .. it was NOT excessive spending which caused the problem, but structural deficiencies, "not of individual countries, but of Europe as a whole" .. the countries are too diverse to operate under one currency as it was set up .. America's financial system has made trillions of dollars worth of mistakes .. markets left alone do not work .. 2008-2009 America's financial system failed .. inefficient, incompetent...

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Prof. Josef E. Stiglitz: "The Future of Europe"

UBS Center - Published on Feb 4, 2014

Public Lecture by Prof. Josef E. Stiglitz
The Future of Europe
Monday, January 27, 2014

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Stiglitz: Leaving the euro painful but staying in more painful

ari100teles Published on Feb 22, 2014

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Stiglitz: The Euro Crisis – Causes and Remedies

ari100teles Published on Oct 11, 2014
September 23, 2014, Rome, Italy

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Nobel Economist Joseph Stiglitz Hails New BRICS Bank Challenging U.S.-Dominated World Bank & IMF

democracynow Published on Jul 17, 2014

http://www.democracynow.org - A group of five countries have launched their own development bank to challenge the U.S.-dominated World Bank and International Monetary Fund. Leaders from the so-called BRICS countries -- Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa -- unveiled the New Development Bank at a summit in the Brazilian city of Fortaleza. The bank will be headquartered in Shanghai. Together, BRICS countries account for 25 percent of global GDP and 40 percent of the world's population. To discuss this development, we are joined by Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, a professor at Columbia University and the World Bank's former chief economist. "It's very important in many ways," Stiglitz says of the New Development Bank's founding. "This is adding to the flow of money that will go to finance infrastructure, adaptation to climate change -- all the needs that are so evident in the poorest countries. It [also] reflects a fundamental change in global economic and political power. The BRICS countries today are richer than the advanced countries were when the World Bank and the IMF were founded. We're in a different world -- but the old institutions haven't kept up."

This video is an excerpt from the Democracy Now! interview. Watch the full segment here: http://www.democracynow.org/2014/7/17...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjyaGLFWWNA

See also:

Don’t Blame the Internet for Rising Inequality - by John Quiggin .. excerpt..

The growing wealth and power of the 1 per cent has been driven by the expansion of the financial sector. The rise of finance has coincided with the collapse of those institutions which, in the ‘Great Compression .. http://www.nber.org/papers/w3817 ’ of the income distribution during the 1950s and 1960s, saw workers in the US and other developed countries capture a large share of growth. Domestically, these institutions included strong trade unions, an education system that promoted social mobility and macroeconomic policies that prioritised full employment. In global terms, at least in the First World, these institutions were backed up by the Bretton Woods system of fixed exchange rates, a system which included tight restrictions on international flows of capital, particularly short term flows of speculative capital.

This system broke down in the 1970s (the causes of this breakdown, which remain controversial, are discussed in my book Zombie Economics [ http://press.princeton.edu/titles/9702.html ] ).[2] The result was the rise, or rather resurgence, of a finance-dominated form of capitalism and its associated ideology of market liberalism.

Global capital flows now massively exceed .. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_exchange_market .. the volume of trade and long-term investment. By some measures, the volume of outstanding financial assets is now approaching a quadrillion (i.e. a billion billion) dollars, mostly in assets and liabilities that are supposed to offset each other, such as interest rate swaps. The majority of corporate profits, and of top 1 per cent incomes, are derived from the management of these financial flows .. http://www.epi.org/publication/ib331-ceo-pay-top-1-percent/ .

The link between the financialisation of capitalism and the rise of the 1 per cent is direct and, now that the evidence is in (thanks largely to the work of French economist Thomas Piketty and the public advocacy of leading economists like Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz), seemingly undeniable. But the fact that the evidence appears undeniable does not mean that it will not be denied: any proposition, no matter how absurd, will have plenty of defenders if it is useful to the dominant class and its ideology.

For a while, defenders of market liberalism were able to argue that the growth of inequality was overstated, and that, in any case, static measures of inequality were less important than dynamic measures reflecting economic mobility. These arguments have largely been abandoned in the face of accumulating evidence that inequality is becoming increasingly severe and entrenched
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=109493464

Wealth Inequality in America
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=102473107

.. the last, one of yours featuring videos with Reich, E Warren, Hanauer, Stiglitz, Krugman and Neil deGrasse Tyson .. and others ..