Joe Stiglitz: Why the world economy's malaise continues

[David Morris]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/brad-delong/global-economic-depression_b_8924596.html?1452263364

In the aftermath of 2008, Stiglitz was indeed one of those warning that I
and economists like me were wrong. Without extraordinary, sustained and
aggressive policies to rebalance the economy, he said, we would never get
back to what before 2008 we had thought was normal.

I was wrong. He was right.

Despite the positive jobs report today
<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/obama-jobs-report_568fbbfbe4b0cad15e64580c>,
we have climbed back less than halfway to where we were in 2007 and less
than a third of the way back to where we were in the full-employment year
of 2000.
[...]

Unless something big and constructive in the way of global economic policy
is done soon, we will have to change Stiglitz's first name to "Cassandra"
-- the Trojan prophet-princess who was always wise and always correct, yet
cursed by the god Apollo to be always ignored. Future economic historians
may not call the period that began in 2007 the "Greatest Depression." But
as of now, it is highly and increasingly probable that they will call it
the "Longest Depression."


On Thu, Jan 14, 2016 at 2:00 PM, David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com> wrote:

> The economics of this inertia is easy to understand, and there are readily
> available remedies. The world faces a deficiency of aggregate demand,
> brought on by a combination of growing inequality and a mindless wave of
> fiscal austerity. Those at the top spend far less than those at the bottom,
> so that as money moves up, demand goes down. And countries like Germany
> that consistently maintain external surpluses are contributing
> significantly to the key problem of insufficient global demand.
>
> At the same time, the U.S. suffers from a milder form of the fiscal
> austerity prevailing in Europe. Indeed, some 500,000
> <http://thinkprogress.org/yglesias/2011/07/08/263588/the-conservative-recovery-continues-2/> fewer
> people are employed by the public sector in the U.S. than before the
> crisis. With normal expansion in government employment since 2008, there
> would have been two million more.
>
> On Thu, Jan 14, 2016 at 1:39 PM, Robert Mahnke <rpmahnke at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>
>>
>> http://www.huffingtonpost.com/joseph-e-stiglitz/world-economy-2016_b_8908560.html?utm_hp_ref=world
>>
>>
>>
>
>
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