Stiglitz pinpoints 'moral' core of crisis

By Henry CK Liu

Nobel Laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz, a Roosevelt Institute senior fellow and its chief economist, said on CNBC on January 19 that the US is infested with "ersatz capitalism", a flawed, unfair system that socializes economic losses and privatizes the gains. He decries the "moral depravity" that has led to the current financial crisis.

Stiglitz served in the Bill Clinton administration as chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers (1995-97) before moving to the World Bank as its chief economist, where he developed a Pauline epiphany against the very neo-liberalism he helped promote in the form of "the Third Way", to criticize belatedly but rightly and vocally policies of the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Such outbursts put him in conflict with the Treasury Department under Larry Summers, who reportedly forced Stiglitz to resign (2000), presumably for not being a team player. Notwithstanding his government career setback, Stiglitz was selected as a recipient of the 2001 Nobel Prize for Economics.