Economics Podcast

Steven Hill re Europe’s Promise

Sun, 30 May 2010 14:04:11 -0700

WHY DON’T AMERICANS KNOW THIS?

The European Union, 27 member nations with a half billion people, has become the largest, wealthiest trading bloc in the world, producing nearly a third of the world’s economy – nearly as large as the U.S. and China combined. Europe has more Fortune 500 companies than either the US, China or Japan.

European nations are rated by the World Health Organization as having the best health care systems in the world. Yet they spend far less than the United States for universal coverage, even as U.S. health care is ranked 37th.  Europe leads in confronting global climate change with renewable energy technologies like solar and wind power, conservation and “green design,” creating hundreds of thousands of new jobs in the process. Consequently, Europe’s ecological “footprint” (the amount of the earth’s capacity that a population consumes) is about half that of the United States for the same standard of living. 
STEVEN HILL is Director of the Political Reform Program for the New America Foundation and author of 10 Steps to Repair American Democracy and Fixing Elections: The Failure of America's Winner Take All Politics. His newest book is EUROPE’S PROMISE.

Learn more at europespromise.org

Interview: SIMON JOHNSON

Sun, 18 Apr 2010 20:33:55 -0700

SIMON JOHNSON, former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund, is currently Professor of Entrepreneurship at MIT's Sloan School of Management and a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington. He is the co-author of STARTING OVER IN EASTERN EUROPE and co-founder of the blog site THE BASELINE SCENARIO with James Kwak, with whom he also co-authored the new book, 13 BANKERS: The Wall Street Takeover and the Next Financial Meltdown.

From 1974 to 2006 the average amount of money it took to get elected to the House went from $56,000 to $1,250,000. And the financial sector was the top contributor to political campaigns over the last two decades. According to 13 Bankers, from 1998 to 2008 "the financial sector spent $1.7 billion on campaign contributions and $3.4 billion on lobbying expenses,” targeting representatives in positions of power over financial legislation regardless of party.

A year ago – after these banks caused the great recession -- Dick Durbin said of the banking lobby, "they frankly own the place." Now as Congress debates financial reform, the money has only increased. And the authors point out, it’s not just the money. The “constant flow of people from Wall Street to Washington and back ensured that important decisions were made by officials who had absorbed the financial sector's view of the world and its perspective on government policy, and who often saw their future careers on Wall Street, not in Washington."
"In the United States, we like to think that oligarchies are a problem that other countries have. But the fact that our American oligarchy operates not by bribery or blackmail, but by the soft power of access and ideology, makes it no less powerful. We have the most advanced political system in the world, but we also have its most advanced oligarchy."

Interview: MICHAEL LEWIS

Sun, 4 Apr 2010 18:55:09 -0700

Michael Lewis was a trader at Salomon Brothers before he wrote his first best-seller, LIAR'S POKER about the excesses of Wall Street during the 1980s. He continues to write about that world with a couple of books in 2008 and a column for Bloomberg.

I've interviewed many about the financial meltdown -- Krugman, Stiglitz, Greider, Baker, Reich, and more. Lewis's approach varies from the others in that he focuses on a few mavericks who saw what others denied and made fortunes shorting the biggest bets by the biggest players on Wall Street and beyond.

Both Ira Glass and Malcolm Gladwell call Lewis their favorite contemporary storyteller, but I don’t let him tell his compelling character-driven story. He appeals to a broad audience so he has to make this stuff make sense. Instead, I ask him to trace the current crisis from its roots in the '80s. step by creatively destructive step -- from the emergence of hedge funds to the debacle of synthetic collateralized debt obligations. Still a narrative, but one starring purposely arcane and increasingly dangerous “innovations.”

Michael Lewis received a BA in art history from Princeton University and an Masters in economics from the London School of Economics. He worked in investment banking for Salomon Brothers before writing LIAR'S POKER. Other books include MONEYBALL; PANIC: The Story of Modern Financial Insanity; HOME GAME: An Accidental Guide to Fatherhood; and THE BLIND SIDE.

Interview:WILLIAM GREIDER

Sat, 27 Mar 2010 15:18:10 -0700

For some, the Federal Reserve is the right place to house any new regulatory powers contained in financial reform legislation. For others, the Fed is at the center of all that ails us. There are now 32 co-sponsors for S604 in the Senate and 317 for HR1207 in the House, bills to audit the Federal Reserve, and 95,000 have signed a petition at http://www.auditthefed.com/

Willaim Greider wrote SECRETS OF THE TEMPLE, perhaps the finest book on the Federal Reserve. He challenged Greenspan and Paulson long before it was fashionable, and has written lately about restructuring the Fed. So I turn to him to examine this secretive and powerful institution.

Now National Affairs Correspondent for the Nation, GREIDER was for 17 years the National Affairs Editor at Rolling Stone, and 15 years at the Washington Post. He wrote the intro-duction to MELTDOWN: HOW GREED AND CORRUPTION SHATTERED OUR FINANCIAL SYSTEM AND HOW WE CAN RECOVER by editors of Nation, and COME HOME, AMERICA: THE RISE AND FALL (AND REDEEMING PROMISE) OF OUR COUNTRY

JOSEPH STIGLITZ

Sun, 7 Mar 2010 12:57:18 -0800

As bubbles rose and burst, JOSEPH STIGLITZ has been a voice of reason, passion and conscience, sounding warnings, demanding action, and criticizing inadequate responses. For the most part, he’s been on the outside looking in to the Obama Administration as Summers, Geithner, and Bernanke run the show. Not so outside the US. In 2008 French President Nicolas Sarkozy asked him to chair the Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress, and in 2009 he was appointed chair of the United Nations Commission of Experts on Reform of the International Financial and Monetary System.

JOSEPH STIGLITZ is now University Professor at Columbia University, Chair of Columbia’s Committee on Global Thought, and co-founder and Executive Director of the Initiative for Policy Dialogue. Stiglitz was a member and chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers during the Clinton administration, and later Chief Economist and Senior Vice-President of the World Bank. In 2001, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics and he was a lead author of the 1995 Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. STIGLITZ is the author of, among other books, Globalization and Its Discontents, Fair Trade for All, Making Globalization Work, The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict, with Linda Bilmes, and his newest, Freefall: America, Free Markets, and the Sinking of the World Economy.

Learn more at josephstiglitz.com