“.. Freefall is primarily an autopsy of the financial crisis.
Stiglitz details in layman’s terms how financial deregulation encouraged the banking sector to favor maximizing private revenues over managing social risk: ..
.. economic growth was based on exorbitant debt .. that fed a consumption binge.
But Stiglitz also dissects the relationship between the two major economic shifts of the past three decades–
– globalization and financialization, or the transformation of the financial sector into the primary engine of economic growth.
Decades of prosperity and economic interconnectivity bred by bad ideas about the inherent virtues of free markets ..
.. resulted in a stunning economic collapse–and the bankruptcy of market fundamentalism.
Ours is an era of severe economic and social insecurity.
Stiglitz’s response to the crisis is Keynesian: ..
.. to save capitalism from itself.
In the short term this would involve a bigger and better federal stimulus package ..
.. one committed less to tax cuts and more to plugging holes in state and local government budgets ..
.. and to making high-return investments in technology.
In the long term it would demand nothing less than a reinvigoration of economic thought to eradicate the endemic rot of economism ..
.. and to equip ourselves to discuss economic goods in the broadest sense.
Freefall is an excellent place to start..”
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