CAN THE ECONOMY BE SAVED?

A discussion (transcription and audio available) over at the NYPL:

A LIVE from the NYPL forum on the global economic crisis with three leading authorities:

Nouriel Roubini (NYU) was one of the earliest and most persistent economists warning us of the housing bubble leading to our present financial calamities. Jeffrey Sachs (Columbia) has dealt with financial crisis over a quarter century in all parts of the world. Felix Rohatyn is famed as the man who saved NYC from its financial crisis of the 1970s as well as a leading financier, diplomat, and voice for public responsibility. This conversation, moderated by Charlie Rose, among these three experts will enable the public to join in a unique reasoned and detailed discussion of the origins and perhaps solutions to the current upheaval.

From the discussion:

CHARLIE ROSE: How is the economic system—if we have to fix the economic system,
Jeffrey, and all in terms of the way the world works, what kind of financial system are we going to create?
 
JEFFREY SACHS: I think again with a little perspective. It’s helpful to think about our situation as being the end game of nearly a thirty-year period. I view it as the end of the Reagan era that we’re living through right now. Since the early 1980s, we’ve had a philosophy of government that pretty much went right through all the administrations—including the Clinton administration—which was small government, don’t do too much, don’t take on big goals, deregulate, leave things to the market. Didn’t really change very much from administration to administration and the philosophy has had all sorts of wearing problems for us. We went from bubble to bubble to bigger bubble to bigger bubble until finally the biggest of all bubbles bursts. 
 
But we had general view, leave things alone, we don’t have to pay taxes, we don’t have to look after our infrastructure, we don’t have to look after our poor, we don’t have to look after our health system, so it’s not completely a coincidence that we face big problems in so many areas, not only the financial markets. This isn’t a fine-tuned financial problem alone. It showed up as an  explosion in finance for the reasons we’ve been discussing, but a new philosophy is going to, in my view, require a pretty dramatic change of how we view what we’re doing in this country.