"There Are a lot of Crooks Out There"

So declares business journalist Edmund L. Andrews of Capital Gains and Games. His recent recounting of a speech by renowned economist and Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz:

Stiglitz declared that the long-standing principles of mainstream economics didn’t hold up: participants – homeowners and probably financial executives -- did NOT act in their rational self-interest; markets were NOT efficient and self-correcting; private rewards did NOT correspond to social returns. Stiglitz has criticized mainstream economic thinking for years, and he was on the outs with much of his profession as a result. Now the profession is in the midst of a lot of soul-searching, but there aren’t any quick ways to strike a new balance between competition and innovation versus stability, prudence and consumer protection.

Just why the economic community at large did not recognize this en masse is beyond me, but I could speculate that, with Ayn Rand devotee Alan Greenspan at the helm of the Federal Reserve for such a long time, those with their hands in the till didn't give a shit about stability, prudence, and consumer protection. The only thing that ever matters in that alternate universe is personal achievement.