Joseph Stiglitz Quotes

Fortunately, America remains a robust democracy, where most individuals are not afraid to speak out. What we have done in Iraq has, however, compromised out standing as an advocate of basic human rights - the prime minister of one country responding to criticism of America for its human rights put it, it was liking having Dracula guard the blood bank. The loss of America's moral standing has been one of the great losses of this war.

The crisis was 2008, in 2015 - almost eight years later and the gap between where we would have been and where we are is huge and not closing. The implied unemployment rate is very high, labour force participation is very low, and the increase in wages in the second quarter was the lowest in 25 years. Before this turmoil, the U.S. economy was in better shape than Europe or Canada, but not strong.

I find it scandalous not only that there was so little discussion of the costs of the Iraq war before we went to war - this was, after all, a war of choice - but even five years into the war, the Administration has not provided a comprehensive accounting of the war.

I went to Amherst because my brother had gone there before me, and he went there because his guidance counselor thought that we would do better there than at a large university like Harvard.

Our economy has not served large fractions of our population. Trump grasped that. And rather than saying, "What have we not done right?" he said, "It's those foreigners. Let's build a wall." He says globalization is unfair to the United States.

America has had to turn to foreigners to finance its debt - not surprising since household saving in the last years has plummeted to zero. China is one of the largest holders of American debt.

For 60 years, since World War II, we have been trying to create a rules-based system, a global economic system. We understand that what makes our economy function is what we call the rule of law, and what is true domestically is also true internationally. It is important to have rules by which we govern our relations with other countries.

They [free market policies] were never based on solid empirical and theoretical foundations, and even as many of these policies were being pushed, academic economists were explaining the limitations of markets for instance, whenever information is imperfect, which is to say always.

What you measure affects what you do. If you don't measure the right thing, you don't do the right thing.

Capital market liberalization includes freeing up deposit and lending rates, opening up the market to foreign banks, and removing restrictions on capital account transactions and bank lending. The focus is on deregulation, not on finding the right regulatory structure.

I'm writing from New Zealand - a country that decided from the beginning that the War was wrong, and chose not to participate in Iraq War.

There is a clear and strong link between the economy's present woes and the Iraq war. The war was at least one of the factors contributing to rising oil prices - which meant Americans were spending money on imported oil, rather than on things that would stimulate the american economy. Hiring Nepalese contractors in Iraq, moreover, doesn't stimulate the American economy in the way that building a school in America would do - and obviously doesn't have the long term benefits.

Poverty is what we call the extremes at the bottom.

The important lesson of the deficit is - and the national debt - is we have to be careful about how we're spending money.

I don't think if we had been able to make that choice rationally, we would have said that's what we want to do. We would have said: "Can't we save the banks and solve our health care problems?" The answer is yes. You could have.

Active learning is always involved with interaction between teachers and students and Socratic methods and that's gonna continue.

Moreover, because we chose to finance the way by borrowing, our deficits and debt has soared, and this means we have less room for maneuver, less money available to stimulate the eocnomy in the way needed.

The issue is: $1 trillion or $2 trillion is a lot of money. If our objective is to have stability in the Middle East, secure oil, or extend democracy, you can do a lot of democracy buying for this sum. To put it in context: The whole world spends $50 billion a year on foreign aid.

The proposal for a new global reserve currency - or Special Drawing Rights - is a good idea for many reasons. Yes, for the Chinese it would cushion any fall in the value of the dollar per se because it would only be part of a basket of other currencies, including the yen and the euro.

When I said "the pocket of the banks," it is not necessarily a mercenary relationship. It is a mindset.

The budgetary cost to the UK of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan through 2010 will total more than £18 billion. If we include the social costs the total impact will exceed £20 billion.

Certainly, the poverty, the discrimination, the episodic unemployment could not but strike an inquiring youngster: why did these exist, and what could we do about them.

Even if Bush could be forgiven for taking America, and much of the rest of the world, to war on false pretenses, and for misrepresenting the cost of the venture, there is no excuse for how he chose to finance it. His was the first war in history paid for entirely on credit. As America went into battle, with deficits already soaring from his 2001 tax cut, Bush decided to plunge ahead with yet another round of tax "relief" for the wealthy.

Amherst is a liberal arts college, committed to providing students with a broad education.

Economists often like startling theorems, results which seem to run counter to conventional wisdom.

Amherst was pivotal in my broad intellectual development; MIT in my development as a professional economist.

Nationalization of private debts undermines prudential lender behavior and is a government intervention in the market.

There is a growing consensus that the European systems have worked better than the American: They have been able to deliver better health care to more people at lower cost.

The country has large unfunded liabilities - social security, health care, and there will have to be some adjustments to these problems. What is scary though is how much worse things have gotten in the last eight years, and the Iraq war is one of the main factors.

We could, of course, always make the payments, simply by printing more money - we simply promise to pay people by giving them dollar bills - but that could set off inflation.

Economically, we are gain weaker. Millions of Americans have no health insurance - including many poor children. if they do not get the care they need, they may become scarred for life; but the President George W. Bush vetoed the children's health insurance bill - evidently we couldn't afford it. But we were talking about just a few days fighting in Iraq.

You saw on your TV what happened in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. The Reserves or National Guard are usually the people we use for those national emergencies. They weren't here, they were over in Iraq, and so we were less protected.

There was a hope then by some people that what we call trickle-down economics would work. That if you made the economy pie bigger, everybody would benefit. Twenty-five years after NAFTA, we know that that is not true. We should have known then that it was not true.

Similarly, payments for a dead soldier amount to only $500,000, which is far less than standard estimates of the lifetime economic cost of a death. This statistical value of a life in the US amounts to circa $6.5 million.

No one would look just at a firm's revenues to assess how well it was doing. Far more relevant is the balance sheet, which shows assets and liability. That is also true for a country.

If you destroy a firm, you can't pull it out of bankruptcy overnight.

Health care is very different from other sectors of the economy in several respects, one of which is the fact that the risk can be very high beyond people's ability. That leads to insurance.

Trickle-down economics is a myth. Enriching corporations - as the TPP would - will not necessarily help those in the middle, let alone those at the bottom.

When Donald Trump campaigned for president, he told the American people that he would be a different type of Republican, that he would take on the political and economic establishment, that he would stand up for working people, that he understood the pain that families all across this country were experiencing. Well, sadly, it was just cheap and dishonest campaign rhetoric that was meant to get votes, nothing more than that.

Temporary nationalization of the banks that are in very bad shape would mean basically that the government is the temporary owner. I always believe that the government should focus on its comparative advantages, and banking is not one of them. It should, therefore, if it nationalizes banks, sell them back to the private sector.

Development is about transforming the lives of people, not just transforming economies.

In a globally integrated economy, the biggest challenge is to make sure there is adequate global aggregate demand, achieved through spending, when countries like China feel they must save high levels of dollar reserves to protect against international currency volatility.

Global demand for dollars has supplanted demand for manufactured goods and services, resulting in multilateral trade deficits and loss of jobs at home.

Negative effects on the economy were covered up with a flood of liquidity from the Fed. That,plus lax regulation, led to a housing bubble, a consumption boom - but we were living on borrowed money. It was inevitable that there would be a day of reckoning, and it has now come. We will be paying the costs "with interest".

The national debt will have increased by approximately 50% in just eight years! We will have created a new unfunded entitlement - disability and health care benefits for the huge number of disabled veterans returning from the Iraq war.

Much of my work in this period was concerned with exploring the logic of economic models, but also with attempting to reconcile the models with everyday observation.

The international institutions go around the world preaching liberalization, and the developing countries see that means open up your markets to our commodities, but we aren't going to open our markets to your commodities. In the nineteenth century, they used gunboats. Now they use economic weapons and arm-twisting.

The military is focusing only on the short run costs. If they don't provide appropriate body armor, they save some money today, but the healthcare cost is going to be the future for some other president down the line. I view that as both fiscally and morally irresponsible.