On Thu, 15 Aug 2002, Doug Henwood wrote:
> I'm interviewing Joseph Stiglitz on my radio show in about 2 hours > (assuming he shows up). Anyone have any questions for him? I'll be in > email range only until about 4:15 NYC time, when I leave for the > studio. Damn, I had a good question, but I was offline. Maybe you can ask him next time you see him at a party: Q: Recently you and George Soros wrote articles about Brazil that differed on one major point: he though the IMF package would probably fail and you thought it would probably succeed. The main difference seemed to be that you assumed that interest rates would return to 10%, in which case the 3.75% primary surplus demanded by the IMF would be attainable, and Soros he assumed that interest rates would get stuck above 20% when, even assuming 4% growth, the necessary primary surplus would 4.8%, which would be impossible to attain. Given the so far underwhelming response of the markets to the IMF's package, do you think there's a chance Soros is right? And if so, what happens next? And what do you think of his idea of getting central banks to be the lenders of last resort and open up their discount windows? Michael
