Re: [Fwd: CAGE: Interesting Article by Joseph Stiglitz]

On Wed, 12 Apr 2000, Jeffrey L. Beatty wrote:

> Thus, if there was a "method to the madness", it was the desire on the
> part of the free marketeers to create a truly global liberal economic
> order as quickly as possible.  I don't think there was any big secret
> about these intentions.  Note Jeffrey Sachs' confident declaration of the
> attainability of such a goal in his 1995 _Foreign Policy_ article.
> 
> 
> The problem with this agenda is that the bankers and economists who
> favored the free-market agenda, whatever their credentials in the
> economic and financial world might be, have been naive in the field of
> international relations.  I think there has been a tendency, certainly on
> the part of the US Treasury, to ignore Russia's very real geopolitical
> and security interests, not to mention its national pride, and to try to
> use U.S. financial support in a clumsy way as leverage (Never send a
> bunch of economists and bankers to do a political scientist's job, right?
> : ) ).  

I have no doubt that the liberal faith of shared by most economists
played a very real part in the construction of the global macroeconomic
order.  For my part, I remain sceptical that U.S. global strategy was
driven by that faith alone.  On Stiglitz's testimony, by the mid-90's,
most staffers at the WB and the IMF were well aware of the risks their
policies posed, but their arguments were ignored by a secretive and
unaccountable senior executive corps.  I'm doubtful that "ignoring
Russia's very real geopolitical and security interests" represents a
foreign policy failure, rather than a change of priorities.  Realist 
political
theory is no more objective truth than neoliberal economics.  Is it an
accident that an aggresive Albright team was brought in at the start of
Clinton's second term, i.e. BEFORE the onset of the Asian financial
crisis?  

-- 
Boris Stremlin
bc70219@binghamton.edu