Economics at the Edinburgh International Book Festival

This evening I had the pleasure of attending a talk by Joseph Stiglitz, an American economist and professor at Columbia University, at the Edinburgh International Book Festival. He was the Chief Economist at the World Bank and won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 2001. Mr Stiglitz was at the festival to promote his new book Freefall – Free Markets and the Sinking of the Global Economy. During the hour, he talked about why the global economy is in the mess it is in, what the underlying causes are, who is to blame and why the current action by both the American and UK governments may not be the correct solution. He also took questions about the increasing financial power of China, the lack of competition in the banking sector and the lack of progress in developing an environmentally friendly economy. An hour well spent!