Joseph Stiglitz weighs in on the Federal Reserve

Joseph Stiglitz is one of the greatest economists in the world. He's held professorships at Yale, Stanford, Duke, Princeton and Oxford Universities, and now teaches at Columbia University. He was the chair of the president's Council of Economic Advisors under Clinton. He served as Senior Vice President and Chief Economist at the World Bank from 1997 to 2000. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2001. There should be no disputing that he is eminently qualified in the field of economics, which is all the more reason for you to pay attention to what he says about the Federal Reserve. Speaking at a conference held by the Roosevelt Institute, he said that if a country had come to the World Bank under his tenure seeking aid, while maintaining a financial regulatory system like the Federal Reserve, it would have raised very big alarms:

"If we 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 said during a conference on financial reform in New York. "It's time for us to reflect on our own structure today, and to say there are parts that can be improved."

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“Collapse” goes mainstream

Last week I wrote about a new film, Collapse, and the arrival of Peak Oil as one of the primary factors driving that collapse. Two years ago, daring to speculate about the end of America, or of capitalism itself would have been greeted with a hearty guffaw, or at least some very skeptical glances. Today, these concerns are no longer solely the province of the "doomers"-- there is a blossoming awareness of the gravity of the challenges facing us. Consider these warnings from mainstream, highly credible sources:

  • Secretary of State Hillary Clinton argues that our debt and unprecedented deficits have become a national security issue, not merely a matter of economics. Reuters reported:
    Having to rely on foreign creditors hit "our ability to protect our security, to manage difficult problems and to show the leadership that we deserve," she said. "The moment of reckoning cannot be put off forever," she said. "I really honestly wish I could turn the clock back."

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Climate: OJ and the Haystack

Why Climate Change Denial Is Like the O.J. Trial is an interesting article. The essence is that the climate denialists are using the same techniques as the OJ defense team: Find anything resembling a needle in a vast haystack of data, then claim that the presence of the needle casts doubt on the character of the haystack itself. Because there is an overwhelming pile of evidence in support of anthropogenic global warming, there are bound to be occasional pieces of data that can appear to contradict the mass of affirmative information. The pile is overwhelming, especially to non-scientists. Therefore few have the patience to understand the whole thing. Those who want to spin the counter argument claim that, because the two sides are both represented, therefore the issue is in doubt. And, as in the OJ trial, if there is cause for doubt, then no action is to be taken.

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“The greatest preventable holocaust in the history of planet Earth”

"The greatest preventable holocaust in the history of planet Earth" That's the judgment on what awaits us from Michael Ruppert, in a new documentary entitled "Collapse". The age of fossil fuels has been a blip in the scale of human history. We've only been using them a few centuries, and yet we are unable to remember a time when fossil fuels were not abundant and cheap. That age is now over. Recent experience has taught us that the end of this age was heralded by massive price spikes and has already caused the greatest economic dislocation since the Great Depression, or possibly even including it. Given that the growth of human population has so neatly coincided with the growth in the production of fossil fuels, human population now faces a analogous decline on the far side of the bell curve.

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