Joseph Stiglitz Quotes

I am all in favor of growing the American economy and engaging in trade with the world, but not at the expense of American workers. The North American Free Trade Agreement is a perfect example of this. Ask the textile workers of North Carolina how NAFTA worked out for them - if you can find any.

Unfortunately, the United States has entered into several free trade agreements that do not sufficiently protect and support our manufacturing industries and the millions of American workers they employ.

Unfettered free trade has been a disaster not only for Americans but for the working people of Mexico and Canada as well.

When you liberalize trade, benefits go to capital and away from labor.

The effect of Bill Clinton's NAFTA and Hillary Clinton's Colombian Free Trade Agreement has been devastating to Michigan and most of the rest of the country, and accounts for the appeal of Donald Trump.

What is good for General Motors is not good for America if General Motors is moving production out of the United States.

With Hillary, you know, I think, across the board, Hillary is the Wal-Mart candidate. Though she may change her tune a little bit, you know, she's been a member of the Wal-Mart board. On jobs, on trade, on healthcare, on banks, on foreign policy, it's hard to find where we are similar.

Free trade is an important component of our economy, but it also has to be fair. Too often, the needs of American workers are ignored while the interests of huge corporations are the focus of these trade deals.

The jobs aren't going away. They're bringing in people to replace Americans in those jobs. And this Trans-Pacific Trade Partnership, it makes it worse.

That level of trade deficit throttles real growth in our country and continues the unfortunate path of selling out America. We are not winning the global trade war, we are losing it badly.

Politics is just a function of business now, just a tributary of the great entrepreneurial capitalist system.

Now, given the experience that we have had thus far, with our subsequent trade agreements with NAFTA and others, you would think that with our experience of job loss that we have had there that when you find yourself in a hole that you might stop digging.

The Bush Administration and the Congress have to stop ignoring this crisis in international trade. The longer we ignore it, the more American jobs will move overseas. It's just that simple.

Since NAFTA was put in place, Mexico has lost 1.9 million jobs and most Mexicans' real wages have fallen.

The new social question is: democracy or the rule of the financial markets. We are currently witnessing the end of an era. The neoliberal ideology has failed worldwide. The U.S. movement Occupy Wall Street is a good example of this.

We are on pace this year to have a trade deficit that is larger than $800 billion. We have never faced that before, but we continue to put forward trade agreements like these that leave us naked to competition that is neither free nor fair.

I fear that CAFTA will accelerate the demise of these domestic textile jobs.

Governments' thirst for investment is compounded by the insatiable appetite of employers for new markets and a 'competitive' labor force, by which they mean cheap and endlessly exploitable.

The developing countries are scared out of their wits now, because they don’t understand what they’re being forced to sign. The agreements are going way outside the trade issues and involve a helluva lot of things like your access to oil, your access to intellectual property and capital controls…. When I looked through the investment agreements, it was worse than reading my insurance policy for the fine print. I couldn’t make anything out of it, and I’m a reasonably informed person, a pretty smart economist as they go.

The people see the layoffs. We must also show them the payoffs of trade.

Free trade is not a principle, it is an expedient.

Free trade ideas often look great in prospect but less in retrospect.

Under the guise of trade deals and trade agreements, its [free trade] really been used to keep workers in the world suppressed in terms of their wages or qualities of life.

The benefits of trade diffuse across the economy, but the cost of trade are concentrated.

U.S. trade policy has been a disaster for American workers.