Joseph Stiglitz on How Foreign Governments Are Buying America | Big Think

Joseph Stiglitz on How Foreign Governments Are Buying America

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Joseph Stiglitz on the problem of sovereign wealth funds.

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Joseph E. Stiglitz:

A graduate of Amherst College, Joseph E. Stiglitz received his PHD from MIT in 1967, became a full professor at Yale in 1970, and in 1979 was awarded the John Bates Clark Award, given biennially by the American Economic Association to the economist under 40 who has made the most significant contribution to the field. He has taught at Princeton, Stanford, MIT and was the Drummond Professor and a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. He is now University Professor at Columbia University in New York and Chair of Columbia University's Committee on Global Thought. He is also the co-founder and Executive Director of the Initiative for Policy Dialogue at Columbia. Stiglitz helped create a new branch of economics, "The Economics of Information," exploring the consequences of information asymmetries and pioneering such pivotal concepts as adverse selection and moral hazard, which have now become standard tools not only of theorists, but of policy analysts. In 2001, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics for his analyses of markets with asymmetric information, and he was a lead author of the 1995 Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. His most recent book, The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict measures the war's opportunity cost to Americans.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Card: What’s wrong with foreign investment?

Stiglitz: Well, you know, when Merrill Lynch and Citibank had a problem at… earlier on in the crisis, they turned to foreign sources of funds including The Sovereign Wealth Funds, they had to, you know, with Americans saving zero, there is no liquid wealth in the United States, they turn… turned abroad. And that was a point where people started worrying about, you know, we have been telling people all over the world, open up your markets to our firms but when foreigners started coming to American markets, people got a little bit nervous about this. Now, the first observation is, I think, the Sovereign Wealth Funds had been [lost] enough in their investments in American financial markets that they’re going to be reluctant whatever we say to put more money in to the United States and, you know, you say, “Burn once, your problem. Burn twice, it’s my problem.” You know that they have to take better diligence and they know they can’t, you know, understand… trust what’s going on. Now, I can… I’ve talked to the heads of [IB] Sovereign Wealth Funds and quite honestly, they’re quite angry. For the United States to be talking about transparency when you see what’s going on in American’s financial markets, you see the way the government’s been bailing out with such a non-transparent way, they say, you know, “C’mon!” Talk about hypocrisy, let’s be real here. Now, as an economist, my perspective is the following: it’s obviously good to have more transparency but we aren’t putting, you know, hedge funds are not transparent. If we say that Sovereign Wealth Funds had to be more transparent and they’re not transparent enough, the Sovereign Wealth Funds can put their money on hedge funds, we don’t know who’re investing in hedge funds. So this is all a charade… this is all a charade to make people feel like we’re doing something. Now, what we need to think about is what are we worried about? What are worried about? If the Sovereign Wealth Fund comes in and invest in a company and loses money, well, you know, is that a problem? [There’s] a Japanese back in the ‘80s bought Rockefeller Center and lost a lot of money in the deal, was that a problem? There are some things that we need to worry about. If somebody buys… establishes a monopoly position, that’s a problem. If somebody buys, you know… one of the really weird things that we did is we privatized the US Enrichment Corporation which makes the critical ingredient in atomic bombs and [enriched uranium]. We should fill nervous about having somebody owning that facility.

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