Joseph Stiglitz

Who is he: Joseph E. Stiglitz is a Professor at Columbia University's Business School. Dr. Stiglitz received the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 2001. Stiglitz, like all of the monetary power elite, has served in many powerful positions including Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors under President Clinton and VP and Chief Economist for the World Bank.

Joseph Stiglitz is of course very critical of Austrian and free-market economists, often calling the latter, "free market fundamentalists." What is more unusual is his sometimes critical views on the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank which may well be Stiglitz's exit strategy for retirement as the powerful Anglo-American elites do not take kindly to one of their own criticizing their controlled institutions.

Dr. Stiglitz has continued to express his sometimes-dissenting opinions even to the Obama Administration. Although an advisor to President Barack Obama, Stiglitz was extremely critical of the administration's Wall Street rescue program. Stiglitz reportedly said that whoever designed the Obama administration's financial rescue plan is "either in the pocket of the banks or they're incompetent." Here at the Daily Bell, we believe that rather than an either/or situation, both statements are stated correctly.

Background: Joseph Eugene Stiglitz was born on February 9, 1943 in Gary, Indiana, which is not known as a home to many of the Northeastern elite establishment. Joseph Stiglitz attended Amherst College and was elected president of the student government. Stiglitz also attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before transferring to Amherst. Later Stiglitz attended graduate school at MIT from which he received his Ph.D., and later held several academic positions at Yale, Oxford and Princeton.

Dr. Stiglitz served as the 17th Chairman of the President's Council of Economic Advisors from 1995 to 1997 and as the Chief Economist of the World Bank from 1997 to 2000. Starting in 2000, Stiglitz established a think tank at Columbia University called the Initiative for Policy Dialogue.

Whereas economists of the Austrian School propose that truly free markets are efficient, Dr. Stiglitz believes exactly the opposite. Stiglitz thanks that only under unusual circumstances are markets really efficient. Stiglitz advances the case that with free-market capitalism, there should be state coercion, in other words socialism, as a remedy and to properly allocate resources.

Stiglitz is even more interventionist and Keynesian than was economist Paul Samuelson, arguing that "government could potentially almost always improve upon the market's resource allocation... establishes that an ideal government could do better running an enterprise itself than it could through privatization." Stiglitz is the ultimate power elite economist promoting centralized control, government intervention and even ownership over free markets and private enterprise. This has made him a useful intellectual tool for the Anglo-American Axis in promoting their agenda that the world needs their control.

The real problem for Dr. Stiglitz is that whether he's right or wrong, he seems unable to keep his mouth shut when in disagreement with those who employ him as an expert. Stiglitz has bitten the hands that feed him regarding the other elite control organizations like the IMF and World Bank by going off-message.

Stiglitz has bucked the establishment view in several areas. First, in his 2002 book, Globalization and Its Discontents, Stiglitz makes the case that the IMF does serious damage in developing nations via the financial and economic policies forced on these nations in order to receive IMF loans. Stiglitz also claims that many so-called "developing economies" are not actually developing and in fact never do develop.

In an April 2000 article in The New Republic, Professor Stiglitz stated: "They'll say the IMF is arrogant. They'll say the IMF doesn't really listen to the developing countries it is supposed to help. They'll say the IMF is secretive and insulated from democratic accountability. They'll say the IMF's economic 'remedies' often make things worse – turning slowdowns into recessions and recessions into depressions. And they'll have a point. I was chief economist at the World Bank from 1996 until last November, during the gravest global economic crisis in a half-century. I saw how the IMF, in tandem with the US Treasury Department, responded. And I was appalled."

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