The rich West must stop grabbing the profits but ducking the costs

Heroes of anti-capitalist protest don’t usually hang out at the Savoy. But Joe Stiglitz is different: the establishment figure who turned on the establishment. He’s a former chief economist at the World Bank and a Nobel laureate. He chaired Bill Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisers and he’s not afraid to tell you about it (‘When I was in the White House…’). He wears a nice suit and a tidy salt-and-pepper beard. He doesn’t even wear Birkenstock sandals, and he looked well at home amid the comforts of the de luxe London hotel when I met him there.

But beneath the professorial façade is a combative mind and an inability to keep his mouth shut — neither of which sat well with the US Treasury during his tenure at the World Bank. His repeated criticism of the International Monetary Fund, especially its handling of the Asian crisis in 1998, put him on treasury secretary Larry Summers’s blacklist, and he was eventually forced to resign.