Joseph Stiglitz on a global reserve currency

Joseph Stiglitz on a global reserve currency


Joseph Stiglitz is a Nobel Prize winning economist, Columbia University professor, and former Senior Vice President and Chief Economist of the World Bank. In this interview at INET's Bretton Woods conference in New Hampshire he explains why he thinks the US dollar as the reserve currency is hurting the entire world economy
Joseph Stiglitz : What I've argued for is a creation of a global reserve currency. Reserve currencies are, you might think of a store value and the dollar has been very unstable , understandable given the difficulties of the American economy, our performance was not a stellar. But the fact that in a modern globalized economy, 21st Century, it is an anachronism that a single currency would play the pivotal role that the dollar has played. What I argue in my book "Making Globalization Work" is that the dollar reserve currency system contributes to inequality ... and it actually contributes to the weakening of the global economy, because countries are setting aside literally hundreds of billions of dollars, you might say, of precautionary savings. That's money not spent.