Joseph Stiglitz, a former chairman of President Clinton's Council of Economic Advisors, was perhaps best known for his scathing blasts at the World Bank's sister institution, the IMF, and the Fund's interest rate policies in Asia's crisis countries. But as chief economist at the World Bank he committed a multitude of other sins in the eyes of the so-called "Washington Consensus".
| Stiglitz: disagreed with the IMF | ||||||
Stiglitz, for example, had the gall to lambast privatization in eastern Europe and Africa, arguing that legal systems, among other factors, weren't ready to support the change.
He told countries to go slowly when they started to think about liberalizing their capital markets - one of the keys to globalization. And he turned thumbs down at the increasingly successful movement to set up funded, individual retirement accounts, an idea that even US presidential candidate Al Gore recently found a way to endorse.