Gail Alexan­der

If Prime Min­is­ter Patrick Man­ning's da­ta for T&T is cor­rect, it means the coun­try is do­ing much bet­ter than the Unit­ed States, at least in the area of jobs, No­bel Eco­nom­ics Prize win­ner, Pro­fes­sor Joseph Stiglitz, has said.

A for­mer ad­vis­er to both the Pres­i­dents Clin­ton and Oba­ma ad­min­is­tra­tions, Stiglitz made the com­ment dur­ing his fea­ture ad­dress at yes­ter­day's Com­mon­wealth Busi­ness Fo­rum on board the Ser­e­nade of the Seas cruise ship ,which is docked in Port-of-Spain.

Stiglitz, a for­mer World Bank vice-pres­i­dent, said every­one "is in the same boat" of a re­ces­sion "made in the US and ex­port­ed all over the world." He said it would take a glob­al part­ner­ship to get out of the sit­u­a­tion. Crit­i­cal of the US ori­gins of the sit­u­a­tion and some sub­se­quent han­dling on that end, Stiglitz said gov­ern­ments had not en­gaged in pre­ven­ta­tive med­i­cine or im­ple­ment­ed enough re­stric­tions to en­sure peo­ple did not end up "in hos­pi­tal." Not­ing pro­jec­tions that it may take a year or two be­fore the US emerges from the re­ces­sion, Stiglitz said right now, goods could not be sold and one out of six US cit­i­zen could not get a job.

Stiglitz made his com­ment about Man­ning's da­ta at that point. Man­ning had ear­li­er said that in T&T to­day, un­em­ploy­ment stands at 5.1 per cent and in­fla­tion, as of last month, at 2.7 per cent. The glob­al cri­sis how­ev­er, Stiglitz said, has brought the "bless­ing" of re­veal­ing the fail­ures of ide­olo­gies and re­think­ing the busi­ness rules of the game. For in­stance, Stiglitz said, the sit­u­a­tion rais­es the is­sue of how some banks will com­pete with US banks which are re­ceiv­ing hun­dreds of mil­lions in sub­si­dies. "So the glob­al land­scape has changed in a fun­da­men­tal way... the in­ter­na­tion­al com­mu­ni­ty will have to ad­dress some of these ques­tions... there will be re­think­ing by gov­ern­ments and mar­kets and there is a very im­por­tant role for gov­ern­ments," Stiglitz added.

He warned of a new risk in emerg­ing mar­kets of "spec­u­la­tive bub­bles," al­so not­ing that jobs can­not be cre­at­ed with mon­ey com­ing in and out of a sit­u­a­tion "overnight." Stiglitz said: "The ba­sic les­son is that we are go­ing to have to think through the bal­ance be­tween mar­kets and gov­ern­ments." He said the cri­sis called for ex­am­i­na­tion of is­sues, such as part­ner­ship as well as fair­ness and trust in part­ner­ships. He said the cri­sis clear­ly brought out the as­pect of un­fair part­ner­ships. Stiglitz said the US had the rule of law and le­gal frame­works but that did not suf­fice to pre­vent the sit­u­a­tion that led to the cri­sis. He added that US banks had been en­gaged in de­ceiv­ing reg­u­la­tors, and even­tu­al­ly them­selves and the cred­it sys­tem failed it.

Stiglitz said trust was abused in the sit­u­a­tion and a part of that fi­nan­cial sys­tem was very in­no­v­a­tive but in ways of fig­ur­ing out how to ex­ploit poor peo­ple. US home­own­ers even­tu­al­ly lost mil­lions of dol­lars in homes and the US now has a so­cial as well as eco­nom­ic prob­lems, Stiglitz added, al­so be­ing crit­i­cal of com­ments by for­mer Fed chair­man, Alan Greenspan. The sit­u­a­tion there­fore calls for a sense of ethics and busi­ness re­spon­si­bil­i­ty, Stiglitz said, urg­ing in­sti­tu­tions to adopt a trend of treat­ing oth­ers as they would have oth­ers treat them. "The kind of preda­to­ry lend­ing the (US) fi­nan­cial in­sti­tu­tions en­gaged in, I think, was deeply im­moral," he added. On glob­al warm­ing, Stiglitz said coun­tries were not prop­er­ly pric­ing one of the world's scarcest com­modi­ties–the at­mos­phere.