Apple's Profit Reporting A ‘Fraud,' Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz Says

Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz has called Apple’s profits a “fraud,” blaming weak U.S. laws for allowing the company to shift its tax burden to low-tax Ireland.

“Here we have the largest corporation in capitalization not only in America, but in the world, bigger than GM was at its peak, and claiming that most of its profits originate from about a few hundred people working in Ireland — that’s a fraud,” Stiglitz, a former head of the World Bank and an advisor to the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign, told Bloomberg TV this week.

This Is the New Era of Monopoly

For 200 years, there have been two schools of thought about what determines the distribution of income — and how the economy functions. One, emanating from Adam Smith and nineteenth-century liberal economists, focuses on competitive markets. The other, cognizant of how Smith’s brand of liberalism leads to rapid concentration of wealth and income, takes as its starting point unfettered markets’ tendency toward monopoly. It is important to understand both, because our views about government policies and existing inequalities are shaped by which of the two schools of thought one believes provides a better description of reality.

Joseph Stiglitz To Canada: Stay Away From Flawed, Pro-Big Business TPP

OTTAWA — Nobel-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz says Canada should reject the Trans-Pacific Partnership deal because it is a flawed trade agreement that benefits big business at the expense of working people.

The Columbia University professor is delivering that message in a speech at a University of Ottawa conference on the Pacific Rim trade agreement that includes the United States and Japan and covers 40 per cent of the world economy.

Joseph Stiglitz on Canada's Housing Inequality: 'It's Very Disturbing'

Skyrocketing housing prices in Canada's cities, most dramatically in Vancouver, threaten the cohesion of our society, argues Nobel laureate and former World Bank chief economist Joseph Stiglitz.

The Columbia University professor sat down with The Tyee on Friday at the University of British Columbia for a wide-ranging interview, touching on foreign real estate speculation, the changing field of economics, and how the new Liberal government might soon find its promises to the middle class derailed by trade deals such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

Joseph Stiglitz: "Deep-Seatedly Wrong" Economic Thinking Is Killing Greece

On August 18th, Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz joined Harper’s Magazine deputy editor Christopher Beha at Book Culture in New York to discuss the Greek financial crisis. In Stiglitz’s view, the latest bailout not only ensures that the country’s depression will worsen, but undermines the entire European project.

Bad economic ideas inflict untold human suffering. When they come cloaked in a fog of Orwellian obfuscation, their poison and effects can spread with little hindrance. The public is misled. Power plays are hidden from view.

The price of American inequality

The most significant, recent news -- that trust in neoliberalism is dead, that confidence in the unrestrained free market has become unfathomable to the majority of U.S. citizens -- has become more evident since 2008. The event is of course obscured by neoliberalism's continued dominance of conservative and centrist governments, political parties and media, yet it is evident that we are now witnessing its inevitable sequence of delegitimation, ruin and replacement.

The Nobel prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, in his recent book The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future, summarizes some of the failures of neoliberalism via a number of statistics -- for example, by 2007 the average after-tax income of the top 1 per cent  in the U.S. was $1.3 million while that of the bottom 20 per cent was $17,800. The richest 20 per cent earn in total after tax more than the bottom 80 per cent combined. Young men, aged 25 to 34, who only have a high school diploma, have watched their real incomes decline by more than 25 per cent in the last quarter century. Between 2005 and 2009, the average African-American household lost 53 per cent of its wealth, the average Hispanic household lost 66 per cent and the typical white American household lost 16 per cent. The American story over the past generation is one in which the rich get richer, the richest of the rich get even more rich, the poor become poorer and a number of the middle class have dropped into poverty. The above numbers defy political spin -- conservatives cannot explain away people's lived experience of neoliberalism's degenerative economic impacts.

NDP MPs embrace Stiglitz’s message to share prosperity, want to run on it in next federal election

MONTREAL—Nobel-Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz told NDP delegates that inequality is inherently unstable for Canadian society, and that shared prosperity is needed in the country. It’s something that New Democrats are embracing heading into the 2015 federal election.

“He’s one of the most credible global voices on the economy. When he talks about the kind of ideological, dogmatic conservatism that we see in some countries and here in Canada as well, that it increases inequality and instability and hinders economic growth, then I know we can take another path that other countries have taken with spectacular economic results,” said NDP MP Peggy Nash (Parkdale-High Park, Ont.). “So if we look at the strongest economies, whether it’s Denmark or Sweden, countries that have decided that the well-being of their citizens is the priority have shown that that also leads to economic growth. Shared prosperity, benefits everyone.”

Joseph Stiglitz: ‘There Is No Instance' Of A Large Economy Growing Through Austerity

Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz has some choice words for anyone who thinks the only way to improve the economy is to tighten the country's belt.

Among them: You're wrong.

“There is no instance of a large economy getting to growth through austerity," Stiglitz said in an interview Tuesday on “Bloomberg Surveillance.”

9 Facts That Prove Joe Stiglitz Is Right About Climate Change Hurting The Economy

Economist Joseph Stiglitz recently announced that he believes climate change is the most important issue facing the U.S. economy today. Certainly, climate change is serious global issue, but how exactly will it affect the U.S. economy? What follows are some statistics on climate change's impact on the U.S. economy, gathered primarily from non-governmental organizations that deal with climate-change issues.

Joseph Stiglitz on Occupy Wall Street & Why US-Europe Austerity Will Only Weaken Economic Recovery

As European leaders scramble to address the sovereign debt crisis, Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz argues the austerity measures pushed by Germany, the United States and international creditors are only "going to make the countries weaker and weaker." If European economies contract, Stiglitz predicts that "our economy [will] go down further into the hole. ... Those policies then increase the probability of our weak economy tipping over into recession." Stiglitz’s new book is "The Price of Inequality: How Today’s Divided Society Endangers our Future."

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Source: Democracy Now!
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Joseph Stiglitz on "The Price of Inequality: How Today’s Divided Society Endangers Our Future"

Several months before Occupy Wall Street, the Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz wrote "Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%," an article for Vanity Fair. He returns to the subject in his new book looking at how inequality is now greater in the United States than any other industrialized nation. He notes that the six heirs of the Wal-Mart fortune command wealth equivalent to the entire bottom 30 percent of American society. "It’s a comment both on how well off the top are and how poor the bottom are," Stiglitz says. "It’s really emblematic of the divide that has gotten much worse in our society." On Tuesday, Bloomberg News reported that pay for the top CEOs on Wall Street increased by more than 20 percent last year. Meanwhile, census data shows nearly one in two Americans, or 150 million people, have fallen into poverty or could be classified as low-income. "United States is the country in the world with the highest level of inequality [of the advanced industrial countries], and it’s getting worse," Stiglitz says. "What’s even more disturbing is we’ve [also] become the country with the least equality of opportunity."

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Source: Democracy Now!
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