Freefall: America, Free Markets, and the Sinking of the World Economy » (Reprint)

Winner of the 2001 Nobel Memorial Prize for Economics, Joseph E. Stiglitz is the author of Making Globalization Work; Globalization and Its Discontents; and, with Linda Bilmes, The Three Trillion Dollar War. He was chairman of President Clinton's Council of Economic Advisers and served as senior vice president and chief economist at the World Bank. He teaches at Columbia University and lives in New York City.

An incisive look at the global economic crisis, our flawed response, and the implications for the world’s future prosperity.

The New York Times - Kevin Phillips

Freefall has three standout strengths. First, it is a powerful indictment of Wall Street, the United States financial sector and the Federal Reserve Board. Second, it offers a reluctant but persuasive elaboration of how the Obama administration decided to embrace the financial sector and the Fed, continuing and enlarging both the bailout and the too-big-to-fail philosophy that it inherited from George W. Bush. Finally, it is a blunt attack on Stiglitz's own profession, for transforming "scientific discipline" into "free-market capitalism's biggest cheerleader"…Stiglitz's virtue is that he minces few words.

Preface xi

Acknowledgments xxvii

Chapter 1 The Making of a Crisis 1

Chapter 2 Freefall and Its Aftermath 27

Chapter 3 A Flawed Response 58

Chapter 4 The Mortgage Scam 77

Chapter 5 The Great American Robbery 109

Chapter 6 Avarice Triumphs over Prudence 147

Chapter 7 A New Capitalist Order 184

Chapter 8 From Global Recovery to Global Prosperity 210

Chapter 9 Reforming Economics 238

Chapter 10 Toward a New Society 275

Afterword 299

Notes 345

Index 417