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June 28, 2009

Wall Street’s Toxic Message: American Capitalism and the 3rd World

Third-world-debt-0907-01Joseph Stiglitz in Vanity Fair:

Among critics of American-style capitalism in the Third World, the way that America has responded to the current economic crisis has been the last straw. During the East Asia crisis, just a decade ago, America and the I.M.F. demanded that the affected countries cut their deficits by cutting back expenditures—even if, as in Thailand, this contributed to a resurgence of the aids epidemic, or even if, as in Indonesia, this meant curtailing food subsidies for the starving. America and the I.M.F. forced countries to raise interest rates, in some cases to more than 50 percent. They lectured Indonesia about being tough on its banks—and demanded that the government not bail them out. What a terrible precedent this would set, they said, and what a terrible intervention in the Swiss-clock mechanisms of the free market.

The contrast between the handling of the East Asia crisis and the American crisis is stark and has not gone unnoticed. To pull America out of the hole, we are now witnessing massive increases in spending and massive deficits, even as interest rates have been brought down to zero. Banks are being bailed out right and left. Some of the same officials in Washington who dealt with the East Asia crisis are now managing the response to the American crisis. Why, people in the Third World ask, is the United States administering different medicine to itself?

Posted by Robin Varghese at 12:52 PM | Permalink

Comments

Here is the article that should be posted here: "The Great American Bubble Machine" by Matt Taibbi in the July, 2009 edition of Rolling Stone at this link:http://www.scribd.com/doc/16752803/. This outstanding article demonstrates how the American Stock Market has been, for over a century, not legitimate business but garden variety fraud, aided by the criminals in our government.

Posted by: Winfield J. Abbe | Jun 28, 2009 9:59:01 PM

Winfield,

I thought you would be interested in this article about cancer research:


GrantSystem

Grant System Leads Cancer Researchers to Play It Safe

Posted by: Louise Gordon | Jun 28, 2009 10:55:26 PM

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