Following the World Financial and Economic Crisis in 2008, the president of the United Nations General Assembly convened an illustrious international committee, chaired by Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph E. Stiglitz and including twenty leading experts on the international monetary system, to address the crisis and its impact on development.

The Stiglitz Report, released by the committee in late 2009, sees the recent financial crisis as the latest and most damaging of several concurrent crises—of food, water, energy, and sustainability—that are tightly interrelated. The analysis and recommendations in the report cover the gamut from short-term mitigation to deep structural changes, from crisis response to reform of the global, economic, and financial architecture.

The report establishes a bold agenda for policy change, that is sure to be the gold standard for understanding and contending with the international economy for many years to come. The Stiglitz Report is essential reading for anyone concerned about a secure and prosperous world.

This textbook presents a trenchant and compelling analysis of the causes of our recent and on-going global economic crisis. In so doing, it hammers home several more nails in the coffin of the economic ideology that has prevailed for the last 35 years, encapsulated by such terms as market fundamentalism, neo-liberalism, neo-conservatism, or the Washington consensus. This ideology has proclaimed that free market capitalism, with little or no government interference, is the only way to guarantee human prosperity.