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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.

Joseph Stiglitz

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Joseph Stiglitz
Age: 81
Born: 1943
Born: February 9
Critic
Economist
Non-Fiction Writer
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University Teacher
Writer
Gary
Indiana
Joseph Eugene Stiglitz
Joseph Stiglitz
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More quotes by Joseph Stiglitz

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It is trust, more than money, that makes the world go round.
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Nationalization of private debts undermines prudential lender behavior and is a government intervention in the market.
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Most people think the Iraq war has increased the probability of an attack. However, it's difficult to put this aspect into financial terms.
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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.
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The extra curricular activity in which I was most engaged - debating - helped shape my interests in public policy.
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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.
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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.
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The only surprise about the economic crisis of 2008 was that it came as a surprise to so many.
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Not everybody is qualified to go to Stanford, but everybody should have access to the best qualify for which they are eligible.
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Climate change is a reality.
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Anybody who knows about capitalism knows that bankruptcy is an essential part of capitalism.
Joseph Stiglitz
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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.
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The life prospects of an American are more dependent on the income and education of his parents than in any of the other advanced industrial countries.
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In the early 1990s, there was a debate among economists over shock therapy versus a gradualism strategy for Russia. The people in Russia who believed in shock therapy were Bolsheviks a few people at the top that rammed it down everybody's throat. They viewed the democratic process as a real impediment to reform.
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These debt obligations will simply erode America's standard of living in the future. Money spent to service the debt is money that we don't have to spend on consumption's goods, or on investment in our future.
Joseph Stiglitz
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What you measure affects what you do. If you don't measure the right thing, you don't do the right thing.
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For that to happen, growth has to be very strong. To get back to normalcy, we will have to have extended growth of more than 3 percent. That's not in the cards.
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They [political leaders ] thought the only problem was the banking system, and if they fixed the banking system, all would be fine. But the banking system and the mortgage problem were symptomatic of some deeper problems, and evidently they still haven't recognized those deeper problems.
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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.
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I think what they've been doing is largely almost in firefighting mode without a good conceptual framework - either at the micro or the macro level. Micro, you would ask: What kind of financial or banking system do we want? Macro, you would say: What are the underlying problems in the structure of our economy?
Joseph Stiglitz