Stiglitz Urges End to GDP ‘Fetish’ / Warns banking problems now bigger than before…

Stiglitz Urges End to GDP ‘Fetish’ in Favor of Broader Measures – Bloomberg.com
By Mark Deen and David Tweed

Sept. 13 (Bloomberg) — Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel Prize- winning economist, urged world leaders to drop an obsession with examining gross domestic product and focus more on broader measures of prosperity.

“GDP has increasingly become used as a measure of societal well-being and changes in the structure of the economy and our society have made it increasingly poor one,” Stiglitz said in an interview today in Paris.

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Stiglitz Says Banking Problems Are Now Bigger Than Pre-Lehman – Bloomberg.com
By Mark Deen and David Tweed

Sept. 13 (Bloomberg) — Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel Prize- winning economist, said the U.S. has failed to fix the underlying problems of its banking system after the credit crunch and the collapse of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc.

“In the U.S. and many other countries, the too-big-to-fail banks have become even bigger,” Stiglitz said in an interview today in Paris. “The problems are worse than they were in 2007 before the crisis.”