On Nov 9, 2008, at 5:12 AM, Patrick Bond wrote:
> oes anyone know why Stiglitz would risk ridicule by trying to
> contrast Volcker - who rapidly deregulated US banking in the 1980s
> during his sado-monetarist reign - with Summers/Rubin?
Volcker wasn't really about dereg - he was about breaking inflation. He's also an old-style, safety-and-soundness central banker who'd never have put up with the dot.com or housing bubbles. And these days he's making noises about inequality. So my guess is that to Stiglitz, Volcker represents stability and sanity after a drunken orgy.
And, as Leo Panitch has pointed out to you in our little conversations, Volcker wasn't really an ideological neoliberal - he's essentially a civil servant. Nor was he really a Wall Streeter - he worked for Wolfie for a while, but he never got rich, and his whole style is a lot more modest than that of a Goldman Sachs titan.
Doug