If You Like Elizabeth Warren, George Soros, Joseph Stiglitz... Go Here:

[WillyT]

Link: http://www.makemarketsbemarkets.org/

:kick:

Download the report (warning: 146 pages, .pdf file): http://www.makemarketsbemarkets.org/report/MakeMarketsBeMarkets.pdf

:hi:

[leveymg]

1. Had some correspondence with Stiglitz a dozen years ago

It was by post. Pre-email. He was kind enough to respond with a real letter to something I wrote to a magazine about an article he had written.

A very nice, as well as brilliant, man. Would made an excellent Treasury Secretary or Chairman of the Federal Reserve.

Wish I could've made it up to NYC for that event today. Looks very interesting.

[WillyT]

2. I Agree... Treasury, Or Fed, Would Be Fine With Me

:hi:

[Bozita]

3. He was on Charlie Rose last night for ~35 minutes

Charlie was his usual corporate self. Stiglitz was terrific.

[applegrove]

5. Yes I'd like to see either Stiglitz or Krugman in government.

[housewolf]

4. Joseph Stiglitz was on Charlie Rose last night

and BookTV (Cspan2) the past two weekends.

I hadn't had much exposure to him and his ideas prior to the past few weeks. He's articulate, brilliant, has well-thought ideas that he presents well, and he impressed me greatly. He has a new book out, "Freefall: America, Free Markets, and the Sinking of the World Economy" that he's been talking about.

Charlie Rose asked him why the White House wasn't listening to his ideas, was it about a "dust up" that he and Larry Summers had had. He was very kind and sweet and said something like "Oh no, I don't think so. I think the Administration made a decision to embrace Wall Street's perspecctives, and not anything personal towards me or my ideas."

I think we are all the worse off for the administration deciding choosing that course.




http://books.wwnorton.com/books/978-0-393-07596-0/

From the publisher's site:
"Ranging across a host of topics that bear on the crisis, Stiglitz argues convincingly for a restoration of the balance between government and markets. America as a nation faces huge challenges—in health care, energy, the environment, education, and manufacturing—and Stiglitz penetratingly addresses each in light of the newly emerging global economic order. An ongoing war of ideas over the most effective type of capitalist system, as well as a rebalancing of global economic power, is shaping that order. The battle may finally give the lie to theories of a “rational” market or to the view that America’s global economic dominance is inevitable and unassailable.

For anyone watching with indignation while a reckless Wall Street destroyed homes, educations, and jobs; while the government took half-steps hoping for a “just-enough” recovery; and while bankers fell all over themselves claiming not to have seen what was coming, then sought government bailouts while resisting regulation that would make future crises less likely, Freefall offers a clear accounting of why so many Americans feel disillusioned today and how we can realize a prosperous economy and a moral society for the future."

[Bigmack]

6. Warren has it all. Articulate, brilliant, and beautiful! nt

[eridani]

7. Nice summary of the Roosevelt Conference on AlterNet

http://www.alternet.org/story/145942/finance_superstars_talk_about_the_massive_fraud_in_our_economic_system

Finance Superstars Talk About the Massive Fraud in Our Economic System

Last Wednesday, I attended a conference initiated by the Roosevelt Institute on the financial mess, called Make Markets Be Markets. The conference's speakers included people with experience on Wall Street, the banking industry, government and academia; Nobel Prize-winning economist Joe Stiglitz, Elizabeth Warren, and other luminaries who have offered an alternative and reformist narrative to our recent financial crisis. At two and half hours, it was relatively short, giving each speaker the opportunity to make their points and providing a sharp focus. One underlying theme of the event was fraud, the great elephant in the room, that neither the press or our government officials acknowledge, though it is a fundamental element to the financial crisis and its solutions.

Joe Stiglitz started the conference and stated how reducing transparency and hiding information was an essential element to the crisis. Stiglitz concluded, "Innovation was regulator and tax arbitrage." Wall Street and the banks deliberately added opacity and complexity to confuse clients and consumers. Elizabeth Warren pointed out, “complexity made a lot of profits," for example, she showed how the average credit card contract in 1980 was one page, today it is thirty.

This opacity and complexity helped make the financial industry predatory against their clients and customers. Not only did government regulatory agencies fail in stopping this confidence game of historical magnitude, but so did markets. NYU's Lawrence White pointed out the credit agencies such as Moody's and S&P, whose role is to provide independent analysis, essentially became co-conspirators as their business model changed from being paid by investors to being paid by the Wall Street issuers, making it against their interests to issue dour ratings on investments.

The only truly rigorous aspect of economics is accounting. It's no surprise that as the banks and Wall Street sought opacity and confusion through complexity, their greatest target would be the accounting system. There were various elements of "accounting innovation", but the largest, most notorious, and completely incredulous was the practice of "off balance sheet" accounting. One of the greatest elements of this off-book accounting was secularization—simply, the practice of taking existing debt, be it mortgages, student loans, or even credit card debt, bundling it together, then selling it as a completely different product. Josh Rosner, who called the Fannie and Freddie accounting scandal in 2001 and the housing peak in 2005 stated:

"Poorly developed and opaque securitization markets drove excess liquidity and irresponsible lending and borrowing...securitization markets too often operate in a "Wild West" environment where the rules are more often opaque than clear, standards vary, and useful and timely disclosures of the performance of loan level collateral is hard to come by. Asymmetry of information, between buyer and seller is the standard."