Joseph Stiglitz Quotes

The dollar is currently the principal reserve currency in the world.

The dollar is the reserve currency of the world.

The proposal for a new global reserve currency - or Special Drawing Rights - is a good idea for many reasons. Yes, for the Chinese it would cushion any fall in the value of the dollar per se because it would only be part of a basket of other currencies, including the yen and the euro.

The major material advantage, financial advantage from having a reserve currency is that between 200 and 300 billion dollar bills, that may be twenty, fifty, hundred dollar bills as well as ones, exist in the world - a lot of them in Russia as you all know I'm sure.

So if the euro, if Euroland is to become a reserve center, if the euro is to become a reserve currency, Euroland will have to have a deficit in its overall balance of payments.

Another question has been raised rather widely in Europe, in Japan as well as in the United States is what, to what extent will the euro become a reserve currency.

Eventually the dollar won't always rule. Eventually there will be a challenge to the United States and it will have to be like other countries that are a bit concerned about their currency, and then have to ratchet back in order to - right, in order to sustain. We just haven't reached that point yet.

Hegemony of the dollar.

If I had the good fortune of having the ability to influence people all over the world every time I spoke, I would do my best to make sure people understood why the United States of America is special, and then I would suggest that everybody who wants to come here, "I don't blame you, fine and dandy, there's a legal mechanism for this. We're not denying people the right to come to our country. There's a legal way to do it." That's another thing people forget.

In a globally integrated economy, the biggest challenge is to make sure there is adequate global aggregate demand, achieved through spending, when countries like China feel they must save high levels of dollar reserves to protect against international currency volatility.

You figure out, what is the crucial issue facing the country right now? And for Trump, it was that the global economy and the international world order were failing regular people.

If we are going to go into a global currency fight against countries like China, well, the US has about 75, 76 billion in foreign reserves. They're going to be up against China with 1.7 trillion in US dollars and foreign reserves, so it's not much of a fight there. It could be an interesting fight though.

When we, for example, see shifts of huge production lines from certain areas to other countries, people tend to ask the question, "Where's my place in this modern world?" We have this here, this tendency in our country, we have it in other countries.

China is now expected to surpass Japan as the 2nd richest country in the world. They could become the richest, but that's only if we pay them the money we owe them, and that's not going to happen.

You have countries that have lived beyond their means, with bloated governments, huge trade deficits, and people living off the government. Then you have others where poor people are working hard and underconsuming and their governments are buying all this debt and propping up the extravagant countries. All of this has to change. There's a tremendous moral hazard involved with this system.

The main issue [of the Scientific Revolution] is that the people in the industrialised countries are getting richer, and those in the non-industrialised countries are at best standing still: so the gap between the industrialised countries and the rest is widening every day. On the world scale this is the gap between the rich and the poor.

I can tell you exactly where the economy is going. It's going to China, Honduras, Guatemala, Cambodia, Vietnam, Cipan, and any other place where you can pay people peanuts and have them work like dogs.

The median family income in the U.S. is lower than it was a quarter-century ago, and if people don't have income, they can't consume, and you can't have a strong economy. There's significant risk - actually it's no longer a risk - a significant likelihood of a marked slowdown not only in China, but also in a lot of other countries like Brazil, which is in recession. All of the other countries that depend on commodities, including Canada, are facing difficulties. So it's hard to see a story of a strong U.S. economy.

People intuitively know that trade is good for our country. We just have to get the right trade agreements.

While you can say that the problem of the middle class in the rich countries is too much globalization, the problem of the people who are very poor is really that they are not included in globalization. For them, the success of their own countries at becoming part of this international division of labor would be good news.

There's a lot going on that is hurting this country. And there's a lot of businesses and a lot of people that put President-elect [Donald] Trump in office because they are counting on him to get our relationships with China straightened out.

Most people believe that inequality is rising - and indeed it has been rising for a while in a number of rich countries. And there is lots of talk and realization of this. It's harder to understand that at the same time, you can actually have global inequality going down. Technically speaking, national inequality can increase in every single country and yet global inequality can go down. And why it is going down is because very large, populous, and relatively poor countries like India and China are growing quite fast.

The primary factor that enables our government to peddle economic snake oil is the dollar's unique role as the world's reserve currency, and our creditors' willingness to preserve its status. By buying up dollars and loaning them back to us through Treasury debt, productive countries give American politicians cart blanche to play Santa Claus.

The standardization and specialization of industrialization was being undermined by globalization. When people in Bangladesh could produce things much more cheaply than anybody could produce them in Detroit, we no longer were the world capital of industrialization.

The fact is I look at what's happening to this country, I look at the way China is just ripping us off, I look at OPEC the way they are ripping us off with the oil prices. I mean, people are gonna be paying six and seven dollars a gallon for gasoline very, very soon; and you're gonna be up to $150 a barrel; and they wouldn't even be there if it weren't for us.