Salon.com review of Joseph Stiglitz’s “The Roaring Nineties”
[Yes, the quotes are somewhat selectively negative, if you read the whole article, it’s clear that Stiglitz isn’t out to trash Clinton’s policies… but, my take is that the criticisms of the review are much stronger than the faint praise. -Thomas]
Joseph Stiglitz’s new book explains what went right, and wrong, with “The Roaring Nineties.”
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By Andrew Leonard
[…]
The bulk of the book’s criticism is leveled at the Clinton administration, and particularly the Treasury Department, for pursuing policies that fueled the unstable expansion of a stock-market bubble and set up the economy for a hard fall. (That these policies were too often identical with what Republican politicians had long advocated is, however, a consistent theme.)
[…]
What went wrong? The New Democrats of the Clinton administration tried to prove that they could out-Republican the Republicans, by pursuing deregulatory policies that put into effect a set of incentives that encouraged manifold abuses. By failing to crack down on stock-option accounting, by comprehensively deregulating the telecommunications industry, and by being overly deferential to Wall Street at the expense of the general public, the Clinton administration helped created an atmosphere in which corporations and executives were truly free to follow their selfish interests — at the expense of shareholders, employees and the global economy.
[…]
